Information Technology Infrastructure, Management, and Implementation: The Rise of the Emergent Clinical Information System and the Chief Medical Information Officer

The use of information technology will continue to play a large role in improving the quality of care, controlling costs, and boosting efficiency in all industries. Health Information Technology (HIT) is being sought as one of the key tactics to streamline the process of providing healthcare to improve quality and harness costs. It is believed that HIT will lead to a more cost-efficient healthcare system than the current one. Surprisingly, there is no agreed definition of HIT in academic literature or government documentation. HIT refers to a broad base of information technologies used in healthcare from robotics surgery to chronic disease home monitoring devices. However, there is a consensus on the purpose of HIT as the use of computers for the management of information in order to ensure that it is available to the right person at the right time and place. HIT is the basis for a more patient-centered and evidence-based medicine with the real-time availability of high-quality information and the potential to perform broad-scale analytics.