Health Information Management: Integrating Information Technology ...

Chapter 1
Introduction
In all Western countries, concerted efforts are undertaken to enhance the use of
Information Technology (IT) in health care. National, regional and institutional
projects abound to bring the shared Electronic Patient Record (EPR) into being,
and to support the care process with order communication and decision support
techniques. IT, it is hoped, can help reduce medical errors and increase the
quality of health care delivery through optimizing communication. Likewise,
extensive use of Internet technologies and electronic patient records could
enhance the position of the patient (provide him/her with relevant medical
information and access to their own records). Simultaneously, it could provide
governments, payers and patient organizations with comparable information on
the performance of individual professionals and organizations.
Yet there are only a few real success stories in health care IT, and the
frustrations are many. It has become clear that the design and introduction of IT
in the health care sector is a complex endeavour, encompassing the simultaneous
management of technological innovation and organizational change. This book
will introduce the reader to the challenges, lessons learned and new insights of
Health Information Management at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It
focuses on some of the theoretical reasons why introducing health care IT
appears to be ‘a more complex task than putting a man on the moon’ (Collen,
1995:353). Simultaneously, it attempts to provide the reader with concrete insights
and lessons on how to handle these complex issues more successfully.
FOR WHOM IS THIS BOOK?
The book focuses on the development and implementation of health care IT, on
making a health care IT strategy and on evaluating health care IT as part and
parcel of these undertakings. Importantly, this is not a technical volume, but a
text focused on the organizational processes and management of design,
implementation and evaluation of such systems. Health Information
Management, in our view, is the job of handling the information requirements of
a health care organization. In the past century, ‘health information management’
was often a term reserved for those making and archiving the paper medical
records of an institution. A book on ‘health information management’ would