The technological underpinnings of a modern clinical practice

Information is the lifeblood of the modern clinical practice, and the information technology infrastructure is the vasculature that supports the flow of this information throughout the entire health care enterprise. Although the impact of information technology may not be obvious to the overworked clinician, information technology is the underpinning that makes virtually all knowledge-based work tenable. The increasing dependence of clinical medicine on this matrix of technologies is especially obvious when technology becomes the rate-limiting step in clinical process improvement and innovation.