Assessing IT in healthcare

Published: Tuesday March 10, 2009 MYT 10:42:00 AM
Updated: Tuesday March 10, 2009 MYT 11:23:50 AM
Assessing IT in healthcare
By STEVEN PATRICK


KUALA LUMPUR: An initiative to evaluate the cost and benefits of IT in healthcare was announced at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Asia Pacific show, which was held here recently.

Called the Alliance for Clinical Excellence (Ace), the first movers of this global, non-profit initiative include the Hong Kong Society of Medical Informatics, Singapore’s Ministry Of Health Holdings Pte Ltd and the National University of Singapore’s School of Computing.

The first IT healthcare solutions providers involved in Ace are Orion Health (from the United States), iSoft and Chik Services Pte Ltd (both from Australia) and US enterprise solutions giant Oracle Corp. The Ace secretariat is based in Singapore.

Ace seeks to create objective assessments of the benefits and costs of IT and related processes that can be applied across contexts, culture or medical regimes.

Chris Hobson, chief medical officer of Orion Health said that although governments around the world spend billions of dollars on IT in healthcare, no one can quantify its benefits, whether in terms of return on investment or quality of care for patients.

“This is a pressing concern for governments who don’t have the tools to evaluate whatever money they spend on IT infrastructure in healthcare. The benefits must be transparent to the customer,” he said.

Mehdi Khaled, vice-president of Oracle Asia Pacific and Japan healthcare and life services, explained that the Ace initiative is more than just a think-tank.

“We don’t want to just think and discuss, we want to actually do. The more we brainstorm, the more progress we will make. We want to come up with clear metrics for determining the proper criteria for deploying IT in healthcare. He added that Ace will be putting up periodical research material and publications online in the near future.

He said that they would be speaking to the Malaysian government to get involved in the Ace initiative.

The uses of IT in healthcare include electronic health records and clinical applications, which are aimed at helping healthcare providers make clinical decisions.