It being the beginning of National Health IT Week, it seems appropriate to spend a couple days considering some of the health IT predictions being offered by observers around the country.

In all honesty, we’re trying to have it both ways, as we’re not going to make any predictions of our own, but we won’t hesitate to declare whether or not we agree with what others are saying.

For example, at the top of this observer’s list is the suggestion that “patients will organize a single-day national event called Where's My Medical Data, in which providers and payers will be besieged by emails and phone calls from patients wanting their medical records. Patients will complain loudly at the slowness of the responses, the outright refusal by some providers, and the complexity of the records received.”

We’ll meet him half-way, in that we don’t doubt that some patients will complain about access, or the lack thereof, to their records, but we think the road to widespread patient engagement will long and slow indeed.

On the flip side, we agree completely with his prediction that “the human touch becomes a major tech issue.”  What he means is that “we are running a risk of losing the human touch in an age of health tech marvels. Teams may be communicating better than ever, but from the patient's point of view it's a blur of emails, messages, phone calls, and faces.”

This has long been at the top of our list of concerns, though we tend to articulate it as “risking the care part of healthcare.”  After all, information gizmos are great- We pretty much have them all.—be there are times when we can’t help but wonder if technophilia on the part of the IT world’s movers and shakers will end up inadvertently corroding the human touch that has lain at the heart of medicine for millenia.

So check out the rest of his list, and let us know where you agree, or, more importantly, where you don’t.

Photo courtesy of heatingoil via Creative Common