What Are The Top Health IT Trends For VARs Predicted For 2015?

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Health IT saw a lot in 2014 — from Meaningful Use Stages 1 and 2, to ICD-10 false starts and data breaches, to the rapid rise of telemedicine.

To get a look at what might be coming in 2015, Health IT Outcomes conducted a survey of 179 healthcare providers and ranked the trends they think will be the biggest next year.

Highlights

• Clinical documentation improvement (CDI) made the list for the first time.
• E-prescribing returned to the top 10 after falling off in 2014.
• IP networking, telemedicine, and e-prescribing made significant jumps in rank.
• Messaging made the list for the first time

Initiatives That Will Mean The Most To IT Solutions Providers

• Health Information Exchanges. For the health information exchange (HIE), 2015 will be all about finding alignment between stakeholders. Those include ACOs (who will need two-way communication between hospitals and ambulatory physicians), policy/policymakers (who will be busy focusing on creating standards around cloud repositories), payers (who will contribute financial sustainability and will receive unstructured data), and consumers (who will be looking to partner more in the use of their healthcare data in the form of social engagement and other access pathways).
• Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI). This combination technology and process initiative will have repercussions down all of the rest of the healthcare data stream. VARs will be looking at providers who are beginning to understand the importance of clinicians and the way they interact with (feed data into) the tech solutions you offer.
• Secure/Unified Messaging. This initiative touches both the mobile and security world of VARs. Providers are adopting secure/unified messaging solutions to improve workflows and get a handle on the text messaging habits of physicians. It also holds the potential benefit of making a significant dent in the $5.8 billion estimated to be lost every year to inefficient communication.
• E-Prescribing. As of April 2014, 70 percent of physicians were e-prescribing, and that number has been increasing in every state in the country. This has resulted in an overall increase in prescription accuracy because of a drop in dispensing errors (because of decreased legibility issues), and the ability to incorporate alerts when drug interactions or contraindications are present. The increase in utilization, right now, is only being slowed by a few inefficiencies, some of which can be addressed by VARs, including improving the pharmacy callback process.
• Health Data Vulnerabilities. Security will undoubtedly be a top issue in healthcare for quite a while, and your clients still need help in securing their PHI and identifying vulnerabilities in their individual systems. Healthcare as an industry is still leading the way in regard to breaches, and entities at all levels are in need of professional guidance in getting their organizational standards up to code.

To read the full list and more insight into changes in the 2015 list, visit Health IT Outcomes.