Health information technology: promise and progress

Healthcare costs have risen faster than the rate of inflation for decades. The resulting resource constrains have placed substantial burden on organizations, governments, and societies. While the problem is most prominent in the United States, it is a substantial problem all over the world as populations age. Health information technology holds great promise at helping to alleviate these problems. In this commentary, we use the lens of health economics to outline how health IT holds the potential reduce of some these inefficiencies, highlight the progress that has been made, and provide a framework to connect the lessons learned in health economics with the current efforts in health IT. We discuss ideas at the population, organizational, and individual levels. To this end, we highlight the papers in this special issue which deal with both organizational level healthcare deliver issues and individual-level self-care.