As co-presenter with William Galanter, MD, PhD, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, of the literature review for this year’s Physician-Connection Computer Symposium, we are charged with selecting high-impact literature, studies, and news that serve as a view of health IT this year.

Bill loves to focus on pure research and one of the most interesting studies to come out recently covers a way of measuring wrong patient electronic orders. Jason S. Adelman, MD, MS, of Montefiore Medical Center and colleagues wrote in the March issue of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association about the methodology they designed to measure wrong order entry on wrong patients. With the tool, they’ll measure different interventions that might be used to prevent the entry of wrong orders.

I like to focus more on the sexy, flashy stuff that comes across the listserv. This is the year health IT really hit the spotlight in the mainstream press, places like The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and 60 Minutes.  Press and politicians have made claims that we’re not getting our money’s worth with EHRs, the Meaningful Use program is a flop, and in fact technology is adding to unnecessary expense by facilitating upcoding through use of such evil technologies as templates and copy-paste.. We’re getting both positive and negative attention, but I think we need to be careful to highlight true successes, not just horror stories.

The famous RAND Corporation study from 2005 estimated potential savings of $81 billion through the adoption of health IT. People latch onto that and want to know where the savings are. But, as thoughtful commentary by Kellerman and Jones in the January issue of Health Affairs points out those were the estimated maximum savings if we did everything right. We’re just now starting to understand what is needed to do this right. Everyone would agree that we haven’t reached the point of seamless integration with patient omniscient bits and bytes flying effortlessly through the ether, but we’re getting closer.

Another hot topic is the public misperception that the bulk of our day should be spent face-to-face with the patient. Of course we all want more face-to-face time but we have to realize the efficiencies we’ve gained through the use of technology and previous paper processes that are now more efficient. The notion of spending more time in front of the computer isn’t evil—it’s a necessary portion of the career now. I’m not sure that time in front of the computer vs. patients is a fair surrogate for determining quality of care.

We need to be publishing the great things we do to counterbalance these ridiculous assertions that make their way to the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Preventing the entry of wrong orders isn’t sexy so, even though it’s really important, it’s not going to make the front page. Informatics is hotter than ever and we’re on notice. We need to serve up some wins.