New technologies in health communication

To say that the U.S. healthcare system is complex is the understatement of the millennium. To bring the existing system into the twenty-first century by integrating information technology into its operation is the undertaking of the millennium. We find it very interesting that a healthcare system that is so in love with technology to support the diagnosis and treatment of disease has been so resistant to technology to manage and exchange information! As Susan Dentzer, editor-in-chief of the journal Health Affairs, writes, A major anomaly of the Information Age is that a huge sector of the U.S. economy has been so lacking-and for so long-in its use of information technology (IT). As dozens of major industries retooled themselves in the 1980s around new means of conveying, processing, and analyzing information, health care largely sat on the sidelines. We all suffered.