Unintended consequences of health information technology: A need for biomedical informatics

Health information technology (HIT) can address important problems in clinical care and biomedical research. These problems include lack of compliance with clinical practice guidelines [1], insufficient use of preventative medicine services [2] and numerous impediments to clinical/translational research [3]. However, front-line patient care information systems that can influence care may worsen outcomes as well as improve them. Increasingly, there is evidence of significant, unintended and deleterious effects of well-meaning HIT efforts [4]. In this paper we present examples of such deleterious effects and argue that: 1) HIT is a tool that can influence health care and biomedicine (for good or ill) and 2) biomedical informatics efforts are needed to ensure that HIT fulfills its promise in biomedicine.