5 Tips For Increasing Health IT Adoption

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

The Commonwealth Fund has issued a report outlining 5 tips for providers to boost Health IT adoption.

The Commonwealth Fund recently issued a report which focuses on strategies to boost innovation, saying, “Digital health technologies offer the potential to transform health care.”

According to Becker’s Hospital Review and Fierce Health IT, the five recommendations made in the report are:

1. Define opportunities. Technology developers need to know how technology could be used to improve healthcare. Aim to solve large-scale delivery issues.

2. Close knowledge gaps. Increasing networking and learning events to boost knowledge of all parties involved in health IT, from consumers and technology developers to healthcare executives. Hackathons are an example.

3. Use dedicated test beds to evaluate new technologies. Create test beds in care settings to examine and validate the impact of new tools.

4. Enable consumer-centric technologies. Developers must consider the needs of patients when developing consumer-facing solutions, especially how those needs range by age, condition, resources and other factors.

5. Foster industrywide adoption. New technology must be integrated widely across the healthcare industry for its effects to be felt. Address barriers to uptake, such as costs and policy hurdles.

“While digital health technologies can act as levers for changing the healthcare delivery system, no one technology is likely to have a significant impact on the quality and costs of care,” concludes the report.

“Rather, change is likely to come from a confluence of approaches that enable better communication, coordination, and more accessible and cost-effective modes of care. Given this, it is crucial that those working to improve care delivery -from developers, entrepreneurs, and investors to researchers, frontline clinicians, and consumers - work together to focus their efforts on areas of greatest opportunity.