US healthcare IT at a crossroads
Hospitals in the US are suffering from IT growing pains. "The reality," says Vi Shaffer, research vice president for Gartner, "is that having more information more accessible changes the rules for everyone." In the middle of it all are CIOs, who must bridge the old and the new, often learning their evolving role on the fly.
Don't call U.S. hospitals IT wannabes anymore. For years they suffered by comparison with digitally savvy industries like financial services and insurance, which typically spent almost 10 percent of operating budgets to automate both backroom and customer-facing systems. By contrast, the healthcare industry's budget commitments languished closer to 2 percent.
That's changing. Hospitals now devote about 7 percent of their operating budgets to clinical, business and patient-outreach applications, according to technology researcher Gartner. "As we look at the adoption of evidence-based care, it almost demands that you have automation to support that," says Ken Lawonn, senior vice president and chief information officer of Alegent Health, Omaha, Neb.
