Examining HIT Infrastructure Critical to Advanced Technology Success

Building an HIT infrastructure foundation to support innovative medical technology is vital to improving patient care. The progression of advanced healthcare technology leaves organizations eager to adopt solutions and tools that will vastly improve clinician and patient experience. However, organizations can’t adopt these advanced and revolutionary technologies if their IHT infrastructure does not support it. The adage “don’t send the train before the tracks are built” can be applied to the current health IT climate. Innovations in artificial intelligence, robotics, and hyperconvergence have evolved to assist clinicians in decision making processes as well as in the operating room, and have allowed patients to experience better care with fast, intelligent, and reliable technology. Health IT infrastructure in most hospitals today is not built to support the advanced digital tools that are emerging in healthcare, according to a recent Accenture report. “Current infrastructures are designed around a few basic assumptions: there is enough bandwidth to support any remote application, there is infinite storage available in the cloud and hardware will continue to have enough computing power,” report authors explained. “But the demand for immediate response times—especially in healthcare’s physical world—defies this approach.” The strain advanced technology puts on bandwidth, storage, and compute is much too heavy for organizations to successfully support over a long period of time.