Health Technology: Improving Healthcare for the Underserved

Underserved populations experience barriers to health care access, affordability, and quality. These individuals have elevated rates of poor health status and limited access to quality healthcare delivery. Evidence increasingly points to the benefits of incorporating HIE/HIT to help address health disparities and poor health status among the underserved.

The adoption of health information technology (HIE/HIT) in clinical and community settings is currently a national priority. While the overarching goal is to improve health and healthcare of all Americans, this initiative offers a unique opportunity to improve the quality of care for underserved populations. The adoption and meaningful use of highly functional electronic health record (EHR) systems, combined with unprecedented availability of data across systems and geographies through health information exchange, will contribute to quality improvements in a number of ways. A few high impact examples include improved access to the past medical history of underserved patients, improved outreach and monitoring of chronic conditions through patient care registries, improved ongoing quality of care assessments, and community outreach initiatives, leading to better decision making along with patient care and satisfaction.

Numerous new innovative HIT programs, funded through the ARRA Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 (i.e. State Health Information Exchanges, Health Information Technology Research Center, Regional Extension Centers and Beacon Communities) as well as existing programs that promote interoperability between HIE/HIT systems such as the National Health Information Network (NHIN), provide a core foundation for accelerating the adoption of HIE/HIT and offer opportunities for enhanced analysis of aggregated data from previously disparate sources. These advances can serve as a potential catalyst to provide a greater degree of social justice in public health for the underserved and significantly improve the quality of public healthcare for these populations.