Top 10 Health IT Predictions For 2012

5 Key Elements For Clinical Decision Support Systems

In 2012, we will see new and successful accountable care organizations (ACOs), hospital CIOs tackling increasing security risks brought on by clinicians' use of mobile technology, and a majority of providers using electronic health records (EHRs).

These are a few of IDC Health Insights' top 10 predictions for 2012, based on year-long research and conversations with health industry executives. There are five overarching themes impacting the healthcare industry which will affect the future of health IT, according to IDC: health reform, analytics and big data, cloud computing, mobile devices, and social media.

"We are definitely into the next wave here. First we had to get the data digitized and begin to improve upon the workflows at the point of care. I think we are still a long ways off on some of the workflow improvements but we're putting in place the tools that will facilitate that clinical transformation," Lynne Dunbrack, IDC Health Insights' program director for connected health IT strategies, told InformationWeek Healthcare.

"Now that so much patient-related data has been digitized, we are in a much better position to aggregate that data and make it available to clinical analytics engines as well as standard business intelligence tools so that we can really begin to measure performance--financial performance, operational performance, and clinical performance."

[For background on e-prescribing tools, see 6 E-Prescribing Vendors To Watch.]

Here are the Top 10 predictions for 2012 from IDC Health Insights: