Nearly half of health IT leaders (46 percent) report their key business objective for this year is to improve patient care, according to the fourth annual Health IT Industry Outlook Survey from Stoltenberg Consulting.
Here are five key points from the survey.
1. A third of survey respondents (33 percent) name data analytics and business intelligence as the hottest health IT topic for 2016. Population health was a close second with 32 percent of respondents naming it the hottest topic.
2. Though data analytics is exciting, it is not without challenges; 32 percent of respondents say correlating data from diverse and dissimilar sources is the biggest data analytics challenge.
3. Additionally, 37 percent of respondents say their organizations have a data analytics program, but it lacks the resources to complete all desired initiatives.
4. Outsourcing may be popular in health IT, but 38 percent of respondents report budget limitations when it comes to implementing full or partial IT outsourcing.
5. Health IT is a key element of revenue cycle management, but 40 percent of the survey respondents say they lack the ability or face significant challenges when it comes to benchmarking to identify key improvement areas for RCM.
Stoltenberg Consulting conducted the survey at HIMSS16. Respondents include CIOs, CMIOs, IT project managers, IT directors and consultants.