AMIA Report Highlights Vendor Relationships

A report on health information technology (HIT) vendors, their customers and patients, makes recommendations for new practices that target the reduction or elimination of tensions that currently mar relationships between many HIT vendors and their customers, specifically with regard to indemnity and error management of HIT systems. The recommendations are the result of deliberations by an AMIA Board-appointed Task Force. The report, titled "HIT Vendors, their customers and patients: New challenges in ethics, safety, best practices and oversight," will appear in the January/February 2011 print edition of JAMIA, the peer-reviewed journal of informatics in health and biomedicine, co-published by AMIA and the BMJ Group.

The recommendations, adopted by the Washington, D.C.-based AMIA—the association of informatics professionals and a trusted authority in the HIT community—strive to imbue the HIT vendor-customer relationship with transparency, veracity, and accountability through collaborative education focused on the installation, configuration and use of HIT systems, in combination with enterprise-wide ethics education to support patient safety.

The report makes specific recommendations on Contract Language, Education and Ethics, Ethical Standards, User Groups, Best Practices, and Marketing. An additional section addresses Regulation and Oversight of the HIT Industry and next steps.