New class of professionals needed for health IT transformation

Although there is almost universal agreement on the need to transform our nation’s healthcare system, few stakeholders agree on specific solutions.
One area of growing consensus, however, is that the IT infrastructure underlying our healthcare system is woefully inadequate to the task of transformation.
Healthcare transformation will require new models for sourcing, processing, and distributing richer, more complex data in ways that facilitate collaboration, real-time decision-making, and hands-free automation. But numerous obstacles lie on the path to real-time digital collaboration, including healthcare claims clearinghouses that remain the dominant electronic conduit among providers and payers.