The health care IT industry is growing and changing quickly, with March’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference highlighting some major health care trends.
The annual conference tackled technological advances in the implementation of information systems, as well as the challenge of managing increasing amounts of patient data.
Health Care Transformation
The latest statistics indicate that anyone currently studying health care management is likely to graduate into a hungry job market. Overall, employment of health services managers is expected to grow 22 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Occupational Outlook Handbook. That growth rate exceeds the average for all occupations. Many areas in health services will see increases in staffing needs largely because of changing U.S. demographics, particularly the aging Baby Boomer population.
And, increasingly, IT is taking a bigger role within health care. In a March HIMSS Leadership Survey, 51 percent of participating organizational leaders said that they plan to increase their IT staff during the next year, but a full 21 percent said they were worried they couldn’t find enough skilled personnel to fill these gaps.
Interoperability
At the HIMSS conference, experts wrestled with how to make sure electronic health records (EHRs) can efficiently collect all of the patient health information that pours in from an ever-growing list of electronic devices and monitors. As more such devices and monitors enter the health care space, it’s tough to ensure that the EHRs are technologically able to catch all information from every source, and that they can make it available to the health care professionals who need it.
Patient Engagement, Mobile Technology
Attendees also discussed patient-centric solutions, including improving patient access to information online through better health IT implementation.
With increasing numbers of iPhones, iPads and otherg adgets used by both patients and providers, mobile security was another big topic, particularly with regard to concerns about how to keep medical information secure, even while making it more available through mobile applications.
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