Health care IT coming of age

If you look around, you'll notice that health care is inching its way to the brink of a major technology overhaul. According to The New York Times (thanks to IT Facts, our sister blog, for pointed it out) yesterday, a group of 13 health and information technology organizations gave the Bush administration recommendations for a road map that encourage doctors, hospitals, and insurers to invest in modern information technology. The proposed National Health Information Network (NHIN) would amount to an estimated cost of $276B over the next 10 years according to a study, but would only yield $24B in yearly savings if the communications standards were not fully open, say the researchers. (Surprisingly no estimate was made if the standards were fully open, but apparently that's impractical for the health care industry).

While legislators tinker with a plan to push health care into the computer age, hospitals are gearing up to spend more on IT. According to eWeek, research firm Datamonitor