How does lack of information technology affect quality of Healthcare?

As healtheappointments.com writes:

As per Institute of Medicine, “healthcare quality” is defined as the extent to which health services provided to individuals and patient populations improve desired health outcomes. The quality of care which is offered by the US Health Care lags much behind its competitors at the international level, on all measurable parameters. One such field is the failure to use proper Information Technology to support the quality of care. Despite the huge amount of money being spent on healthcare by the US government, the quality of care that is delivered is poor. Several loop holes exist in making proper utilization of information technology in health care which are discussed below. There could be changes made in each aspect of quality of care to overcome such defects and make health care more accessible, affordable and convenient for everyone. For example, electronic medical records (EMR/EHR) are one of the basics in Health Information Technology. Their advantages have been highlighted in this paper. Though the nation spends a huge chunk of its GDP on healthcare, it is still not able to successfully implement the EMRs throughout the nation, in the health care system. Implementing these records in the system will affect the quality of health care delivery enormously. This paper attempts to explain few methods to implement this system for improving health care systems. Overall this entire article speaks about how the lack of information technology affects different sectors in quality of care, existing strategies in market and the goals to improve the health care.

Cost Reduction of U.S. Healthcare

The U.S. devotes a much larger share of its national income to health care than any other country in the world. However, the gross over-spending has not yielded the healthiest population (OECD Health data, 2009). Our economy is continually growing at a lesser rate than healthcare spending. The need to restrain this unsustainable growth in health care costs is often overlooked in favor of reform focused on expanding access to care. Attention must be focused on restructuring the payment process with the goal of reducing costs without sacrificing quality. With an aging population comes chronic conditions that require efficiently coordinated care. About 10 million Americans require long term care, 42% of which are under 65 with disabilities or chronic illness (Rowland, 2009). It is also not uncommon for chronic patients to receive duplicate testing, conflicting treatment advice, and expensive prescriptions from multiple practitioners. The Medicare system was a fee-for service payment plan, until a prospective payment was introduced. A contributing factor to the problem has been the trending of hospitals and insurers to better cover acute episodes rather than preventative or ongoing care. For example, the average length of stay is down from less than 8 days in the 1970s to 4.6 days in late 2000’s. In a similar trend, gross outpatient revenues as a percentage of all hospital revenues was 37% in the mid-2000’s as compared to 16% in the 1980’s (HPAM-GP 1830, 2012).