Appian and National Health IT Week: Why Do I Heart HIT?

Why do I HEART HIT?

It's a question I've been mulling over for the last few weeks since I was asked to write this blog post. In our constantly-connected world, health information technology (HIT) is important because it truly aims to draw together all the various facets of our healthcare delivery system and generally helps us to present them in a unified, coherent, easy-to-understand methodology.

Whether you are:

• • A nurse in an operating room who has a constant view of the patient scheduling throughput for the day
  • A physician in private practice who is tending to a regular cadence of patients with annual physicals
  • A business office manager tending to a delayed remittance on a claim
  • Or, the side of healthcare most of us know: a patient who has shown up at 5:00 a.m. for a scheduled morning surgery but is pleasantly surprised to find that all of your paperwork is up-to-date from the EMR and the only thing required of you are a few signatures

HIT is the backbone that serves up this constant flow of updated, real-time, accurate information on a silver platter. In today's age of consumerism, being able to bring together all these pieces and parts to help us best serve our customers (whomever they may be) is golden.

I got my official start as a healthcare provider when I was 18 as a firefighter and emergency medical technician, but I really "caught the bug" two years prior. One of our down-the-street neighbors was a surgeon and knew of my desire to ultimately be involved in the medical field. For two summers during high school, I was able to shadow him each weekday morning as he and his fellow private practice surgeons performed everything from cholecystectomies to hysterectomies to total hip replacements to open heart surgery.

I was hooked.

I knew that wherever my life took me, being able to ultimately help a patient have even a slightly better existence after an encounter with me than he/she had prior was going to be woven into the fabric of my career.

20 years later, I find myself having worked in various challenging, yet ever-evolving roles in for-profit healthcare, non-profit healthcare, not-for-profit healthcare, healthcare consulting, and now in a software company where I'm able to direct the efforts of our healthcare provider division. Health information technology is the tie that binds all of these worlds (and more!) together, and is a regular source of innovation in our ecosystem. It is incredibly gratifying and humbling to realize that we are all cogs in this machine, constantly pursuing excellence in care delivery through HIT.

Happy National Health IT Week!

Fritz Haimberger

Vice President, Healthcare Provider Solutions