Abstract: Information technology in health care (HIT) is getting a major boost
in the United States through the passage of the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The portion of the Act that relates to health
information technology (HITECH) seeks to achieve widespread implementation of
electronic health records (EHRs) across the land and assure that these EHRs
achieve sufficient levels of `meaningful use' to improve care, reduce costs,
and result in better outcomes. This chapter sets the stage for the other
chapters that follow in this section. The chapter will review current thinking
about how HIT will facilitate collection, dissemination, and evaluation of
information throughout the system. Further, it will discuss the role and
potential for HIT to support a learning organization [7,8]. Finally, it will
outline the current widely identified barriers to progress, e.g., standards
development, lack of interoperability and connectivity, and limited decision
support that uses evidence-based guidelines created and maintained explicitly
to be actionable through computer-based records and systems. Further, with the
passage of HITECH, there is a continued attention given to privacy policy at
the expense of access to person-specific health information for legitimate
social purposes including research and community health. More will be said
about this near the end of the chapter. Finally, the chapter will end with a
discussion of the difference between information and communication and it will
advocate for greater attention to the use of technology as a tool for improve
communications and not simply storage and transmission of information.