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Detroit automaker plead for IT in healthcare

By Bandile Sikwane, ITWeb journalist
Johannesburg, 27 Nov 2006

Detroit automakers plead for IT in healthcare

Detroit automakers have written a letter to President Bush saying spiralling healthcare costs are placing the industry and America's manufacturing base at a serious competitive disadvantage, reports Detroit Free Press.

The automakers say increased investment in health IT can lead to a more efficient system, thus reducing healthcare costs.

"Currently, the domestic automobile industry provides healthcare benefits to over two million Americans at an annual cost of nearly $10 billion."

US encourages IT adoption

The head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is calling on employers to commit themselves to encouraging adoption of health IT standards as one of the four goals for providing more information on healthcare quality and costs of services, reports HR.BLR.

In order to enable the availability and secure exchange of healthcare information there needs to be support for interoperable health information systems and products, says the HHS.

Canada implements e-health

The Canadian national survey of hospitals, primary and continuing care indicates that e-health initiatives across the country have moved from the technology acquisition stage to the implementation phase, reports ITBusiness.

"What we found this year is a lot hospitals have placed emphasis on implementing the functionality in the software they had purchased," said Michael Martineau, project lead for the study.

That doesn't mean everything's done yet, though, he said. "In many cases people are just rolling-out pilot programmes so use is probably a little lower than deployment."

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