BARRIERS TO HEALTH IT 2
Despite the recent increased progress in the adoption of the Health IT in most states,
providers still encounter barriers. Firstly, Health IT adoption is costly in the initial stages and in
times of a physician’s time. Financial pressures and time are situations barriers as they
discourage adoption of the Health IT in many healthcare organizations since high financial costs
are incurred while the payoffs are uncertain (Daim et al., 2016). Also, difficulties associated with
technologies such as insufficient computer knowledge and skills may pose a problem in the
adoption of IT in the health sector. This notion calls for a trained and skilled clinical informatics
to ensure a successful process. Finally, implementation of the health IT is impacted by the
confidentiality concern as people feel that privacy is exposed.
I believe that high initial set up costs is the single most challenging factor in the
implementation of the health IT. The high cost of purchasing the system as well as maintenance
cost discourages adoption of IT in health care. However, the health IT has numerous benefits in
spite of the high finances required as it enables physicians and patients to communicate easily
and engage in a shared decision making thus improving health care. The implementation process
may be expensive, but the quality and efficiency are improved since one does not have to do
paper work which is tedious and time-consuming.
Adoption of the Health IT for various purposes including recording, storing and
transferring clinical, financial information electronically in health care industry is crucial in
medical practices. Basically, EMRs run in different ways as they all serve diverse purposes. The
EMR mostly focuses on a certain medical specialty within different departments of the
institution, but not between healthcare organizations (ONC, 2016). As compared to the EMR and
EPR, EHR is more comprehensive as it goes past the patients’ medical history and allows
information to be shared among various hospitals.
