Hospital CEO ad CIO perspectives on information technology issues in health care is a survey of 1400 US hospitals. The article is aimed at establishing the CEOs and CIOs think about Information technology I healthcare. The themes that were under survey are; implementation of electronic medical records and improving health care quality through information technology. Improved medical services include; security, accuracy and change management in hospitals. Other themes in this article include; healthcare supply chain, compliance with regulations, decision support systems, national database and consumer empowerment.
The article starts with an introduction to Healthcare Information Technology (IT) and how it can benefit a health facility in terms of operation cost if implemented. The article is focusing on the emphasizes and the policies put in place by the US administration concerning the use of computers in the management of data in hospitals. From the introductory part, it is clear that the article is focusing on the implementation of IT in healthcare facilities within U.S. the paper is also looking at the effort that has been done by the Obama administration in the Healthcare service improvement by ensuring that all patient records are digitized in a standard manner.
Some of the benefits according to the article on implementing information technology in hospitals is improving services, secure exchange of medical data between customer and medical providers. It has the benefit of reducing errors in the medical information systems about patients hence increase efficiency in the provision of health care costs, decrease paperwork and improve population health.
The reason for choosing CEOs and CEOs of hospitals has been explained in the article, CEOs are directly responsible for the management practice of IT within their organization while CIOs are responsible for coming up with strategies of the organization. The CIOs are responsible for providing direction when it comes to IT challenges in the organization. This is the reason for choosing this group as the population sample and the target population in the survey.
The researchers did a review of previous work concerning healthcare and IT implementation right from the early 1980s literature. The review provided a gap in research of IT healthcare especially the health care electronic records. The research questions and themes were then developed from a review of previous work to understand what has not been addressed in IT healthcare studies.
Quantitative methodology approach was then used after document analysis approach. The survey questions were administered to different CEOs and CIOs. The methodology part also clearly shows the purpose of the study. This paper assumes that it is the first article on healthcare IT issues. It is also assumed that the CEOs and CIOs contacts in the database are the current ones who are heading those hospitals. The researchers further assume that all hospitals have IT infrastructure implemented in their organization.
The article did not address the possible factors of the perception of the CEOs and CIOs on the top ten issues in IT healthcare. The researcher should have further given the literature review of the previous paper and how they came up with top ten issues.
This article relates to course objectives in many ways. The first objective is about the benefits of IT in hospitals, the article has mentioned the importance of having IT in healthcare. The third object is about exchange of data in hospitals, having electronic medical records facilitates the sharing of information. The paper also looks at how the CIOs and CEOs are important in the implementation of information system. CIOs are strategy creators in an organization and they are directly responsible for IT strategy and plans in an organization.
The article concludes that most of the CEOs and CIOs had a similar perspective concerning the list of top ten issues. There were small variations in views between urban and rural hospitals ad also between small and large hospitals.
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Reference
Palvia, P., Lowe, K., Nemati, H., & Jacks, T. (2012). Information Technology Issues in Healthcare: Hospital CEO and CIO Perspectives. Communications Of The Association For Information Systems, 30293-312.
