About GoHIT-

The overarching goal of the Governance of Health Information Technology (GoHIT) project is to explore the organizational, professional and legal "governance" challenges surrounding the introduction of new health information technology (HIT) in American hospitals. This multi-method investigation seeks to inform both practical policymaking and academic theorizing on central questions of innovation, standard-setting, trust, accountability, and legal compliance in the healthcare arena.

To  map the largely-unexplored terrain of HIT governance in American hospitals, the project brings together three distinct empirical efforts:

(1) EXPERT-INFORMANT INTERVIEWS, designed to identify the likely governance challenges that new HIT will raise in the next 3 to 5 years;
(2) ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK, designed to trace the responses of a large academic medical center to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), a major federal regulatory initiative addressing the core HIT governance challenges of data standardization, computer security and patient privacy;
(3) A NATIONWIDE SURVEY OF HOSPITALS, designed to measure the practices and beliefs affecting both HIT adoption and HIPAA compliance across a wide range of economic, legal and social environments.

Additional investigations: Along with these three main empirical enterprises, the GoHIT umbrella also covers several smaller “side projects” that have emerged in the course of the research:

(1) HIPAA HISTORY: To put contemporary empirical observations into context, the GoHIT project team is constructing a brief history of the HIPAA statute and regulations. This historical research focuses on four topics, in particular: (1) the history of the “electronic data interchange” movement within the healthcare industry; (2) the history of the “patient privacy” movement within the healthcare consumer community; (3) the intersection of these two movements in the genesis of the HIPAA statute and regulations; and (4) the parallel (and to some degree consequent) rise of a new constellation of “health-information professions,” which have become increasingly influential players in the CIT governance field.

(2) LAY INTERVIEWS: to investigate lay understandings of the use and governance of health information, the GoHIT project team conduct a small-scale survey and follow-up qualitative interviews with lay people in Madison, WI and Philadelphia, PA. The results provide a valuable counterpoint to the other components of the GoHIT project, which focus more heavily on healthcare providers than on healthcare consumers. The juxtaposition hints at potentially important interconnections and contrasts between lay and professional views of the health-information terrain.  (This component of the research was supported by an internal grant from the University of Wisconsin's NIA-funded Center for the Demography of Health and Aging).

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