The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has released an updated Health IT Dashboard with the results of a comprehensive literature of the impacts of health IT titled: Health Information Technology: An Updated Systematic Review with a Focus on Meaningful Use Functionalities. The report is focused specifically on identifying and summarizing the evidence relating to the use of health IT as outlined in the Meaningful Use regulations.
Research Methodology
The ONC performed a systematic search of the English-language literature indexed in MEDLINE from January 2010 to August 2013. Content experts were asked to identify evidence outside the peer-reviewed literature. Finally, a technical expert panel identified additional published articles and non-peer reviewed resources. Systematic review was carried out in three stages by health IT subject matter experts, with input from a panel of five nationally-known health IT experts.
The systematic review identified 12,678 titles, and through the screening process identified 236 studies meeting the eligibility criteria: assessing the effect of health IT on healthcare quality, safety, and efficiency in ambulatory and non-ambulatory care settings.
Key Findings
The literature review results include findings that the majority of new studies indicate that health IT enabled significant gains in health care quality, but efficiency and safety were still the subjects of relatively little research. Approximately 77 percent of studies reported positive or mixed-positive findings.
In addition, the report has a complementary interactive data visualization that allows users to see the value of health IT across these outcomes including:
- The effect of health IT on outcomes
- A clickable interactive tree map that shows what Meaningful Use health IT functionalities have positive or negative impacts on healthcare outcomes.
- Sortable and interactive table of 236 new health IT studies to explore what the new research evidence shows regarding the relationship between health IT and quality, safety, and efficiency.
For more information, Download the full pdf report from HealthIT.gov, or dig deeper into the literature with ONC’s interactive data visualization.
