Welcome to National HIT Week!

By Joe Wivoda, Chief Information Officer

As a species we enjoy celebrating things. Birthdays (mine is November 28), anniversaries, National Joe Day (March 27th – you can call yourself Joe that day if you like), even National Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbors Porch Day (August 8). Today happens to be National Felt Hat Day, but more importantly for me, since felt hats make my head itch, it is the beginning of National Health IT Week! I haven’t been this excited since I found out there was a National Joe Day.

HIT is important to rural health care. HIT offers an opportunity to improve the health of the communities we serve, to improve the efficiency of the services we provide, and to improve the quality of the care that we provide. HIT has become an important fundamental technology, almost as fundamental as telephones or the lights. The infrastructure nature of HIT will become more obvious as health reform efforts move care from pay-for-volume to pay-for-quality in the next few years. It’s important to stop and consider how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go, in HIT.

What are you going to do for HIT week? Well, you don’t need to buy a present for your local HIT professional. Please don’t look for ways to make more work for your HIT person by deleting random files from your computer or violating HIPAA in such a way that an extensive privacy audit will need to be completed. I recommend the following:

• If you are not signed up for your patient portal, do so!

• If you have more than one patient portal because you see several providers and they do not share data, consider setting up a personal health record of your own (I use Microsoft HealthVault) and copy all of your data there.

• Read this blog every day this week. There will be a new post each day about HIT. Sorry, shameless self-promotion is one of my weaknesses.

• Look around at all the ways HIT is present in our community: hospitals, clinics, home care, long-term care, medical supply, pharmacy, school nurse, behavioral health provider, state corrections facility. These are all businesses that likely use significant HIT. Heck, in my small town of Hibbing, MN we have an HIT vendor (IRCS – they make behavioral health EHRs)!

Spend some time thinking about the future of HIT as well. We are in the “bag phone” stage of HIT. When cellular phone technology was first made available the phones were large, expensive, unreliable, and were presented in a less-than-stylish black canvas bag. Our current EHRs will seem silly and incomplete in five years, so consider what HIT will look like. I will be blogging on that later in the week, so feel free to comment with thoughts below or send me a tweet @WivodaRural.

Also, to celebrate HIT week, I just might have a whiskey over ice!