Survey: Health IT Leaders Cite Improving Patient Care as Key Business Objective in 2016
Nearly half of all health IT leaders report that improving patient care across the continuum is their organization’s key business objective for 2016, according to a Health IT Industry Outlook Survey from Stoltenberg Consulting.
The healthcare information technology consulting firm, for the fourth year in a row, surveyed CIOs, chief medical information officers, IT directors and consultants and project managers at the HIMSS Conference 2016 in Las Vegas to gain insights into healthcare organization’s key IT obstacles this year.
For the second year in a row, the majority of respondents (33 percent) pointed to data analytics and business intelligence as the biggest topic in health IT, with population health close behind (32 percent).
Forty-six percent cited improving patient care as the key business objective this year.
When looking at health IT challenges, 32 percent of respondents said correlating data from diverse and dissimilar sources is the biggest hurdle to data analytics. Health IT leaders also report that there are in the early stages of work with regard to data analytics programs. In fact, 36 percent of respondents said their data analytics programs are young, and they need assistance to further develop them. And, 37 percent stated that their organizations’ data analytics programs are well underway, but they lack resources to complete requested initiatives.
Health IT is a key component of revenue cycle management, yet 40 percent of health IT professionals report that an inability or challenges with trending and benchmarking data to identify areas of improvement is the largest revenue cycle optimization hurdle for healthcare providers.
And, on the topic of IT outsourcing, 38 percent of respondents cited budget limitations are the largest organizational reservation to implementing either full or partial IT outsourcing, with 24 percent stating that the amount of time to manage a project is an organization reservation.
