Health Information Technology -where are we heading?.

The current issue of "Harefuah" dedicates a special corner to Health Information Technology (HIT), with a collection of five review papers discussing different areas of the field, focusing on its benefits to the quality of healthcare. In the first paper Topaz and Ash describe the United States MeaningfuL Use project, and list the lessons that the Israeli health system should learn from it. Zelingher and Ash analyze the decision of the Israeli Ministry of Health to move from the old coding system of ICD-9-CM to a combination of SNOMED-CT as a clinical terminology system and ICD-10-CM as the classification coding system. The authors conclude that achieving a standardized, homogenous and thorough coding of problems, diagnoses and procedures will enable interoperability in the Israeli health system. Shalom et al present us to the world of computerized clinical guidelines. They review the different projects that aim to bring tools and methods to transform the paper based guidelines to computer programs that support the everyday decisions that physicians take regarding their patients. The authors focus on their experience in developing methodology, tools and a library of computerized guidelines, and describe their evaluation in several projects. Shahar et al dive deeper to describe the challenge of representing time in cLinicaL guidelines and creating tools to discover new knowledge based on represented known knowledge. These two papers demonstrate the meaningful use of medicaL data. In the last article, Siegal addresses some legal concerns evolving from the HIT revolution, pointing to the emerging concepts in Israeli jurisprudence, which regards medical IT as an important contribution to patient empowerment, aspects of medical risk management and management of national health system resources. In the judgment of the Israeli court, a medical organization will possibly have to take the responsibiLity of not implementing a proven HIT system. This paper concludes with descriptions of two studies evaluating health information systems in Israel. These studies will be presented at the forthcoming conference of the IsraeLi Association of Medical Informatics (ILAMI).