Physicians slow to integrate information technology into patient practice

From the Massachussetts General Hospital today: "We are investing tens of billions of dollars in health information technology [IT] nationally, yet the medical profession has been very slow to adopt these tools for clinical care," says Richard Grant, MD, MPH, of the MGH Division of General Medicine, the paper's lead author. "We were shocked at the very low rate of basic IT use, particularly among solo-practice and non-academic physicians. I'm sure that the vast majority of them personally use e-mail and the Internet, but most do not have effective ways to integrate these tools into clinical practice."
Not only in clinical practice, but in many health departments. All of us should think about how much better our use of prevention practice would be with better data systems linking clinical practices to local health departments.