It’s all about the timing. There is
no doubt that information technology has enormous potential to help health care
in a myriad of ways, especially in creating data stores that exceed the
capabilities of human memory, and processing power that exceeds human
cognition. (Masys,
S33-41) Further, successive collection
of voluminous data creates an unprecedented circumstance in the volume of
information, and the ability to mine it for knowledge and discovery. (Masys,
S33-41)
For example, Medline, which record
bibliographic entries for 4,500 journals, which as of 2002, consisted of 1.7
million records; however, was growing at a rate of 400,000 entries per
year. At that rate, if a practitioner read two articles per evening,
it would take 550 years to get through the backlog – without consideration to
the voluminous new entries. (Masys,
S33-41) Moreover, GenBank, the genetic
sequence database run by the US National Institute of Health (NIH0, now has 211,423,912,047 base pairs and 193,739,511
gene sequences. (National
Institute of Health, 2016)
Therefore, it is important to look beyond the
month-to-month, and year-to-year, progresses and regresses of developing,
deploying, and using health information technology and prematurely declaring
whether or not HIT has met that goal as of today; that answer, is sure,
healthcare has improved. The more important question will become
whether our own goals of creating and applying HIT will become a long-term
detriment to health care from unmanageable data and knowledge that, once again,
will exceed human cognition.
Works Cited
Masys, D. R.
(S33-41). Effects Of Current And Future Information Technologies On The Health
Care Workforce. Health Aff, 2002.
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