Engineering information technology for actionable information and better health

Information technology in health care (HIT) is getting a major boost in the United States through the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The portion of the Act that relates to health information technology (HITECH) seeks to achieve widespread implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) across the land and assure that these EHRs achieve sufficient levels of 'meaningful use' to improve care, reduce costs, and result in better outcomes. This chapter sets the stage for the other chapters that follow in this section. The chapter will review current thinking about how HIT will facilitate collection, dissemination, and evaluation of information throughout the system. Further, it will discuss the role and potential for HIT to support a learning organization [7,8]. Finally, it will outline the current widely identified barriers to progress, e.g., standards development, lack of interoperability and connectivity, and limited decision support that uses evidence-based guidelines created and maintained explicitly to be actionable through computer-based records and systems. Further, with the passage of HITECH, there is a continued attention given to privacy policy at the expense of access to person-specific health information for legitimate social purposes including research and community health. More will be said about this near the end of the chapter. Finally, the chapter will end with a discussion of the difference between information and communication and it will advocate for greater attention to the use of technology as a tool for improve communications and not simply storage and transmission of information.