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Health information technology (HIT) is the application of "hardware and software in an effort to manage and manipulate health data and information." HIT acts as a framework for the comprehensive management of health information originating from consumers, providers, governments, and insurers in order to improve the overall state of health care. Among those improvements, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) of the United States believes HIT can reduce or eliminate errors from medical transcription, reduce the number of diagnostic tests that get duplicated, and improve patient outcomes and service efficiency among other things.
The "technology" of "health information technology" represents computers, software, and communications infrastructure that can be networked to create systems for manipulating health information. As such, the science of informatics and its focus on information processing and systems engineering is also integral to the development, application, and evaluation of HIT. In particular the subdivision of health informatics, which focuses on the resources, devices, and methods required for optimizing the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine, is most relevant. However, other subdivisions of informatics such as medical informatics, public health informatics, pharmacoinformatics, and translational research informatics are able to inform health informatics from different disciplinary perspectives. (Full article...)
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