Impact of Provider Investments in Health IT

On Monday HIMSS released the results to their annual Leadership Survey.  The results of the survey indicate that federal initiatives to advance health IT adoption are starting to pay off.  The survey looks at provider investments in terms of capital and resources in qualifying for meaningful use, converting to ICD-10, improving data security and tacking the challenges of health information exchange and interoperability.  The survey was completed by 600 hospitals throughout the U.S.

Key Findings on Health IT Adoption

• 66% of the respondents have qualified for Stage 1 meaningful use
• 75% of the respondents expect to qualify for Stage 1 in 2014
• 87% of the respondents indicated they will complete ICD-10 conversion by the October 2014 compliance deadline

The survey also identified challenges hospitals are facing in health IT adoption including shortages in health IT staffing. 21% of the respondents indicated concern they will not be able to secure the staff need to achieve health IT transition objectives, specifically in the areas of clinical application support, network/architecture support and clinical informatics.

Other Key Findings

• 51 percent of the respondents reported their organization participates in at least one  health information exchange in their area, a slight increase over last year.
• 19 percent of respondents indicated that their organization has experienced a security breach in the past year. Of top concern is the securing of  information on mobile devices.
• On a scale of one to seven, health IT executives recorded an average score of 4.94 on importance of patient attitudes on adoption of new technology.

This year’s HIMSS Leadership Survey was sponsored by Infor, a leading provider of health IT solutions . We sat down with Steve Fanning, Vice President, Healthcare Industry Strategy at Infor to ask him about the results of the survey. You can listen to the podcast  here:

Read and download thus year’s HIMSS Annual Leadership Survey.