Characteristics of the healthcare information technology workforce in the HITECH era: underestimated in size, still growing, and adapting to advanced uses.

Objective: There is little readily available data about the size and characteristics of the healthcare information technology workforce. We sought to update a previous description of the size, growth, and characteristics of this workforce based on the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics Database, a resource that includes hospital size, number of beds, amount of staffing, and an eight-stage model of electronic health record adoption (Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model, EMRAM℠).

Materials And Methods: We updated an analysis done using a 2007 snapshot of the HIMSS Analytics Database with a comparable snapshot from 2014 in order to estimate the size of the current workforce and project future needs.

Pediatric palliative care and eHealth opportunities for patient-centered care.

Background: Pediatric palliative care currently faces many challenges including unnecessary pain from insufficiently personalized treatment, doctor-patient communication breakdowns, and a paucity of usable patient-centric information. Recent advances in informatics for consumer health through eHealth initiatives have the potential to bridge known communication gaps, but overall these technologies remain under-utilized in practice.

Purpose: This paper seeks to identify effective uses of existing and developing health information technology (HIT) to improve communications and care within the clinical setting.