Health IT – Benefits for Patients and Health Care Providers

If the citizens of a country are healthy, it goes a long way in ensuring the overall development of the country. With advancement in health information technology, a revolution in the healthcare sector is on the charts in near future.

The efficient, secure and interoperable information network built with the inclusions of health IT ensures the health and well-being of the patients as they are kept at the center stage of this whole system.

What are Health Information Technologies?

Health information technologies include services and tools that help the health professionals in carrying out their day-to-day activities. In other words, healthcare IT deals with a broad range of concepts which include data sharing, managing patient information, medical imaging and many more.

Health IT is all about data, images and information which can be used for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases. This information can be presented as forms in various formats and can be easily stored in electronic medical records. It can be stored on many types of devices or within protected cloud services.

Today the health IT comprises various aspects that include patient education, disease management, clinical practice management, health record management, clinical decision support and many more.

Benefits of Health Information Technologies

Health information technology has tremendous benefits to offer for both patients and healthcare providers. As a patient, you are able to view and control your electronic medical records. As a physician, you are able to access critical information from multiple sources through a computer network, eliminating time-consuming research, saving money and reducing delays.

Some of the main benefits are listed as follows:

Benefits for Patients

• Consumers can get access to real-time information about their health which is essential for the care and management of consumer’s health as well as for the health of their loved ones.
• Through health IT a person can send his/her medical information to various health care providers either through the interface itself or by letting them download their physical reports. This is extremely convenient and costs saving.
• A patient can even ask questions to his/her physician and interact through a secure email service. This ensures proper sharing of information and building a better relationship between a doctor and the patient.
• Even reminders are sent using the services of health IT to the patient for any follow-up or about a health concern.
• Electronic sharing of a patient’s medical summary builds a direct provider-to-provider communication thereby eliminating any unnecessary or duplicative services. As a result, the end cost is drastically reduced which makes health care affordable; even for the persons who don’t have enough resource to get access to a quality healthcare facility.
• Health IT helps in building a trust of a patient towards his/her health care provider.

Benefits for Health Care Providers

• The inclusions of health information technology especially EHRs can help doctors to coordinate in a better way among each other. For example, if a drug prescribed by one doctor interacts with the one prescribed by the other, EHRs can strike an alert about this. Also, EHRs have the records of the drugs which didn’t suit sometimes. So in the end report based on EHRs, a doctor can use his/her ability and offer better health care services to the patients.
• As better communication is there between doctor and the patient it ensures high quality and error-free care.
• Since all the health reports and information is centrally located, all the physicians have direct access to it. This enables them to provide safer and dependable prescriptions in less amount of time. Moreover, it drastically reduces the burden on the healthcare providers as they have so many patients to take care of.
• Access to real-time information of the patient’s health can tell the physicians about the equability of the services provided by them i.e. whether a certain group of patients have better health outcomes or gone worse.

Summary: The Future of Health IT

As of now health IT is not widely adopted by a major chunk of health care providers across the globe. But everyday health IT is taking significant leaps in the medical industry which is definitely going to widen its reach in coming future. This will improve the overall quality of life of every person in terms of health care.