The President’s Council identified that development of effective health IT systems in the United States has been impeded by a number of barriers. One of these barriers is the fact that the existing health IT systems and infrastructure are proprietary applications whose data formats are not easily exchangeable between different systems. The Council noted that such IT systems are hard to be adopted by most healthcare organizations. For this reason, the diffusion of IT in healthcare organizations has been slow and thus incapable of providing effective solutions for dynamic health care needs. The second barrier is that majority of healthcare organizations that use electronic records regard them as internal sources. Accordingly, most organizations have little motivation for investing in external uses such as handling data in cloud technologies (President’s Council, 2010).
The third barrier is that patient concerns about the security and safety of their information makes them unwilling to participate in the development of electronic health care systems. The Council established that some patients refrain from giving consent to have their information used in research. This challenge is being addressed through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996) privacy rules, which established a mechanism for protecting patients’ health information. The last barrier is the fact that historically IT systems have been oriented towards enhancing administration in healthcare organizations. This has been the case because under the current pay-for-service mode of operation, most healthcare organizations do not see the need for investing in sophisticated IT systems. Some organizations are skeptic that the cost of maintaining such systems can be very high in the long run. Therefore, they have established simple systems to support administrative functions only (President’s Council, 2010).
Reference
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (2010). Report To The President Realizing The Full Potential Of Health Information Technology To Improve Healthcare For Americans: The Path Forward. Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-health-it-report.pdf
