INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURE
Congruent with the selection process, it is important for health care executives to have an understanding of the underlying IT architecture. In other words, how does the organization choose among different technologies and ultimately bring them together into a cohesive set of health care information systems? This section addresses this important question by examining health care information system architecture.
An organization’s information systems require that a series of core technologies come together, or work together as whole, to meet the IT goals of the organization. The way that core technologies, along with the application software, come together should be the result of decisions about what information systems are implemented and used within the organization and how they are implemented and used. For example, the EHR system or the patient accounting system with which users ultimately interact involves not just the application software but also the network, servers, security systems, and so forth that all come together to make the system work effectively. This coming together should never be a haphazard process. It should be engineered.
