Health Information Technology and Quality Management

Introduction

One of the most widely discussed areas in the health care field is improving the quality of patient-centered care within Health Information Technology (HIT). HIT allows for the all-inclusive management of medical information and the protected exchange between health care consumers and providers (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2008). Health care comprises of the use and management of a profusion of information that must be collected, managed, reviewed, processed, and mined (McHaney, n. d.). With this in mind, HIT is proclaimed to be the solution to improve patient-centered health care and quality, while reducing cost within the medical industry (Hersh & Wright, 2008). There is an emergent agreement in the health policy community that cognizant and involved patients have a dynamic role to play in refining the quality of care that the United States (U.S.) health system delivers (Robert Wood Foundation, 2007). A rising frame of research is commencing to offer solutions to that question, but there are also considerable holes in the research (Robert Wood Foundation, 2007). The foundation, content, and circulation of the health quality information that is currently available to consumers all vary widely. For instance, proportional evidence on quality performance for health plans has been accessible for some time in the form of the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures (Robert Wood Foundation, 2007). It is imperative to postulate relational characteristics of high quality care and ask patients to describe those involvements (e-Source Behavioral & Social Sciences Research, n. d.). It may also be useful to rate the extent to which care met patient expectations, but it is important to recognize that high satisfaction does not necessarily imply high quality (e-Source Behavioral & Social Sciences Research, n. d.). Even though HIT has the potential to transform the delivery of health care effectively and efficiently, health organizations continue to lack in this area.

A health organization has often been treated like a manufacturer who is advised that using cheaper materials can reduce manufacturing costs. The end result is that the manufacturer saves money on manufacturing costs but at the same time defects are accumulating and the results are subpar products. As we relate this to health organizations the ill effects of these short cuts are not externally evident, the health organization gives poor service or makes errors. Ultimately, health organizations fail in any of the countless ways in which organizations fail when they are poorly sustained. When health organizations operate inefficiently without proper funding, the odds become stacked against them.

Stakeholders will be described as individuals, affected continually in the health care administration, processes, and accompanying actions associated with its realism (Li, 2015). The effects may be through providers, employers, patients, and payers either in direct or indirect, including the populations where the health care facilities are located (Li, 2015). Those in the health care arena have a duty to cogitate the desires and anticipations of its stakeholders (Li, 2015). Managing stakeholder expectations is a method perturbed with cultivating project performance by sustaining the requirement of all stakeholders with applicable communiqué for every stakeholder requirements and problem perseverance when required (Project Management Lexicon, 2015).