What Are The Challenges Of Information Technology In Healthcare?

Information technologies (IT) have been used in healthcare since the 1950s. Initially, the focus was on the back office (e.g. billing and patient administration), primarily in hospitals. IT support for clinical services grew substantially from the 1970 's onwards, initially focused in specialized areas such pathology. Linking the plethora of systems together within hospitals became a high priority from the 1980 's.
By the 1990 's, the focus of healthcare in developed countries, where the health IT investment was occurring, had changed from dealing primarily from acute, short-term interventions to primarily dealing with long-term, chronic conditions that required input from a wide range of specializations provided from both hospitals and community-based

In parallel, huge advances in both genetics and imaging have provided new opportunities to transform care, e-health enabled.
Challenges and Opportunities
There remain many challenges to more globalized e-health. Some are technical. For example, health data are amongst the most complex on the planet and are represented differently in different conceptualizations of health (e.g. western, traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic; medical and nursing).
Some challenges are business related. Many software suppliers use non-standard software to "lock in” vendors - i.e. make it difficult to migrate their data to a competitor. Business models that are predicated on historical service delivery models, such as face-to-face, fee-for-service consultations often penalize remote service delivery.
Other challenges are more directly concerned with globalization. Health financing, regulations, professional governance and many other aspects differ from country to country, raising barriers to technology and clinical practice