IT Drives Move For Better CareIT Drives Move For Better Care

Hospitals and doctors' offices haven't been known as the most innovative IT users. But that's changing. The need to share information more quickly to thwart a bioterrorism attack is only one force driving the industry to embrace IT. Tougher federal privacy laws and rising cost pressures also are in the mix. More fundamentally, however, an industry that's always treated IT as an administrative cost is realizing that technology can help provide better patient care.

Doctors' illegible penmanship is the butt of many jokes, but it also contributes to 7% of all patients having some sort of medication error, says Dr. John Halamka, CIO at CareGroup Healthcare System, a network of six Boston-area hospitals. That's why CareGroup this year launched a $2 million Web-based prescription system. It replaces handwritten, paper prescriptions with ones sent electronically to pharmacists. That reduces errors and, if linked to a patient's electronic medical record, can cross-check and alert doctors to possible drug interactions or allergies. "Prescriptions go from the physician's brain to your vein," Halamka says.

CareGroup is also putting technology in patients' hands. For parents of sick infants, it sets up a Baby CareLink-a Web-based videoconferencing system that helps parents keep in touch more easily with doctors once they take home a baby that was treated in neonatal intensive care.

Powerful networks are becoming critical to patient care as doctors increasingly depend on digital diagnostic tools and electronic records. In rural hospitals, with limited access to specialists, that connection becomes even more urgent. Hawaii Health Systems Corp. faced that problem, so it joined forces with other health-care companies, universities, and the government to build one shared network.

Other hospitals face a bandwidth crunch-complex images such as a cardiac catheterization can be 400 Mbytes or more, and can't be compressed for fear of losing detail that might reveal a health problem. Hospitals such as Foote Health Systems in Jackson, Mich., are using fixed wireless broadband from Western Multiplex to avoid the high cost of fiber-optic cable.

Despite the progress, many financial forces still align against IT in medicine, warns Dr. Judith Brillman, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of New Mexico. If software for doctors isn't completely intuitive and easy to use, doctors don't have time for it. "If an HMO only allows a doctor 10 or 15 minutes for a patient visit, and a software program takes several minutes to use, guess what's going to the wayside? she asks. "The software program."