Health IT has big impact on rural and minority communities

Rural and Native Americans, ethnic minorities in poor, urban communities and Alaskan Natives often suffer negative health outcomes disproportionately due to a lack of access to various health IT tools, according to five research studies published in Perspectives in Health Information Management.

Perspectives in Health Information Management is the online quarterly journal of scholarly research from the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Foundation. Results from the five separate double-blind studies appearing in PHIM’s Winter 2011 edition links the absence of different forms of health IT – including telehealth and mobile health technologies – to inferior health outcomes for several ethnic and cultural minority populations.