HIT Innovations Spring from Strategy, Design, and Need

MedStar and others have pioneered efforts to focus workflow onto a single screen, although much, much more needs to be done in this area. These single-screen prompts also need to be customized to the particular role a given clinician provides in care. Designing those customizations is the tricky kind of detail that is essentially to the success of innovative health information technology, and that this book describes.

Stories from smaller multi-specialty physician groups also find a place in this book. For instance, there's Southeast Texas Medical Associates (SETMA), designated by the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology as one of 30 exemplary practices in the U.S. for clinical decision support.

The screen shots reproduced from SETMA's IT system are a little daunting to me, but then again, they are tracking 200 quality metrics. Still, you can see that ultimately, clinical decision support dashboards are well under construction and in use at many HIT systems today.

In this column, I've just skimmed a few of the many highlights of Innovation with Information Technologies in Healthcare. It takes its place on my bookshelf alongside books such as Connected for Health, which describes how Kaiser implemented its EHR. I'll be writing about that in the future.

For now, hats off to Berkowitz and McCarthy for one of the most useful aggregations of HIT lessons learned that has been assembled thus far.