3 priorities for health IT in 2017

What are your priorities for clinical information technology this year?

That’s the question that HIMSS recently asked healthcare providers, vendors and consultants in their annual Leadership Survey. The results were published in February and they show a healthcare industry aligned around three IT priorities this year: quality, security and care coordination.

The HIMSS report reflects the perspectives of health IT leaders on topics influencing the industry. The 2017 survey got feedback from 368 leaders - mostly in management roles - who represent either healthcare providers or vendor/consultant organizations.

This year’s Leadership Survey was paired with a Workforce Survey that HIMSS conducts every two years. The results suggest that health IT is growing, and that most organizations expect their IT operating budgets to increase this coming year.

HIMSS asked respondents a simple question that illuminates some trends in a complex industry: What are the priority issues for your (or your clients’) clinical IT efforts in the next 12 months?

Health IT leaders from both provider and vendor/consultant organizations agreed on three priorities.

1. Quality and Patient Safety Outcomes - New technologies, applications and technology-enabled workflows can help healthcare professionals measurably improve clinical outcomes and patient safety. Healthcare managers see that IT is creating solutions for sustainable, EHR-enabled quality measurement programs that help organizations comply with federal quality reporting programs.

2. Privacy, Security and Cybersecurity - Both providers and vendors realize the importance of cybersecurity in an increasingly digital and cloud-based industry. Providers will focus their IT energy on implementing seamless and secure safeguards to protect data, reduce costs and establish patient and consumer trust.

3. Care Coordination, Culture of Care, and Population Health - Health IT has an important role to play in improving population health while aligning organizational strategy. In an increasingly diverse landscape of providers and clinical settings, information technology can improve quality outcomes and deliver efficiency, productivity and positive economic value.

While leadership at provider and vendor/consultant organizations both listed these three areas in their top four priorities, some tensions arise as you go further down the priority list.

For example, providers see Electronic Health Records as a top priority for health IT, listin it as #2 after Quality and Patient Safety Outcomes. However, respondents from vendor and consultant organizations listed EHRs as #8. Compliance, Risk Management and Program Integrity was another category that came in higher on the list for providers than for others in the health IT space.

The opposite was true for Business of Healthcare and New Payment Methods, as well as for Health Information Exchange and Interoperable Data Access. Vendors and consultants see these areas as priorities in the next 12 months, but providers list them as less important.

While the Leadership Survey gives us a glimpse of where health IT is headed in 2017, HIMSS calls these divergent priorities “healthy tensions.”