ABSTRACT
Through the 1980s and 1990s, healthcare information technology (HIT) systems moved from stand-alone implementations focused on the needs of a single hospital unit or department to complex inter-networked solutions. Most health systems acquired these systems over many years, and as a result, integration was often achieved through a hodge-podge of poorly understood custom interfaces between systems maintained by the hospital’s information technology organization. Some trends in the HIT business are listed in Exhibit 1.
