H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Implementations

A somewhat remarkable new book will be released in Nov. 2009 by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), of which I am an associate editor. It is aimed largely at IT and healthcare management personnel who are not knowledgeable in Medical Informatics. I express thanks to AHIMA for their forward thinking in accepting and publishing this material.

Books such as this were difficult to get into print just a few years ago, likely due to resistance to their publication by the powerful trade organizations of the health IT vendors:

H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Implementations

In H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Implementations, the editors—all of whom have led successful electronic health record (EHR) and Health Information Technology (HIT) projects—have collected case studies of HIT implementations that didn't go as planned, offering expert insight into key obstacles that must be overcome to leverage IT and modernize and transform healthcare.

... the adoption of effective HIT—now a national priority with the passing of President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)—remains at a fairly primitive stage compared with IT adoption in every other major industry. In fact, healthcare is the only trillion dollar industry that remains primarily in the paper stage, even though most healthcare data are available electronically.

By studying HIT implementations that failed, the editors are able to document, catalogue, and share key lessons that all project managers of HIT, health system leaders in informatics and technology, hospital executives, policy makers, and service and technology providers must learn in order to succeed with HIT.

H.I.T. or Miss presents a model to discuss HIT failures in a safe and protected manner, providing an opportunity to focus on the lessons offered by a failed initiative as opposed to worrying about potential retribution for exposing a project as having failed.

Authors

The editor and associate editors all served on the 2007 leadership board of the Clinical Information Systems Working Group of the American Medical informatics Association (AMIA).

Editor: Jonathan Leviss, MD

Associate Editors:

Brian Gugerty, DNS, MS, RN
Bonnie Kaplan, PhD
Gail Keenan, PhD, RN
Jonathan Leviss, MD
Larry Ozeran, MD
Eric Rose, MD
Scot Silverstein, MD

This book follows the anonymized case study approach I used in my website on HIT difficulties, started in 1999, itself based loosely on the style of the introduction of the 1994 book "Managing Technological Change: Organizational Issues in Healthcare Informatics" (ed. 1) by sociotechnical issues pioneers informaticists Nancy Lorenzi and Robert Riley.

One can talk about "healthcare transformation" via HIT all one wants, but until the current inadequate approaches to HIT (per the National Research Council, 2009) are themselves transformed, doing so is largely wide-eyed utopianism.

I am quite pleased to see this new book appear. (Note: I will not receive any royalties for sales).

-- SS