Potential Dangers of Using Technology in Healthcare

“Health IT [HIT] is not the panacea that many have touted it as, and it’s really a question of a reassessment of where exactly we are right now compared with where we thought we would be,” says Kendall Rogers, MD, CPE, SFHM, chief of the division of hospital medicine at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque and chair of SHM’s Information Technology Committee. “I think our endpoint—that we’re going to get to—this is all going to result in better care. But we’re in that middle period of extreme danger right now where we could actually be doing harm to our patients but certainly are frustrating our providers.”