2007 - A year of Beginning Transitions for IT in Health Care!

Are you a health care provider - a physician, part of a clinic or group practice, a hospital or other provider? Are you computerized in your office beyond patient appointment scheduling and perhaps viewing patient records? Are you linked to those with whom you work with in your office or practice via computer networks? Are you linked to the hospitals and other specialty health care providers such as clinical labs via computer?

If not - then you are missing it! For you could provide better and faster services to your patients, reduce your costs and be a part of the trend to electronic medical records, eliminate medical transcription errors, improve system response and provide your patients with probably better service than you are now providing - all at a lesser cost!

If one of your patients went out of town on a visit or business and somehow ended up in a medical emergency for themselves - wouldn't you like to know that? Would you like to help them? After all - it is you who is their primary physician and you have all their medical information. Why have the EMS personnel who know nothing of your patient take tests and do other things only to find that information is probably already in your patients' files?

You are in the world's largest industry - that of patient care. Everyone in the world at some time or another is going to be a patient. The rest of industries have embraced computers and information systems - but not the health care industry. Less than 18% of all the 996,000 physicians in the USA have any computers, and less than 38% of hospitals in the USA have any computerization, and very very few are linked together. And, this holds true for all other countries.