A new study suggests that while many IT leaders are worried about their facility's basic infrastructure--the equipment that shuffles data from place to place--their colleagues are far more focused on rolling out clinical and financial applications. For the study, Vital STATs 2008, researchers interviewed more than 400 healthcare IT professionals to get a feel for their concerns. The survey, which is backed by solutions vendor CDW Healthcare, found that 40 percent of execs feel that the healthcare industry as a whole has worse infrastructure than other industries. It's not so much that these execs feel that application upgrades are not a good idea--it's just that they're afraid the underlying infrastructure won't do a good job delivering them, researchers said.
The survey found that 79 percent of organizations have implemented or plan to implement a PACs solution, and 54 percent of responding organizations expect to install an automated claims processing platform. However, 41 percent of IT execs say they're afraid that rising support costs and/or overtaxed infrastructure will undermine the ability of these applications to function properly.
To get more on this study:
- read this CDW press release
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