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New prospective payment and outcomes assessment requirements--plus the ever-present need to run a business efficiently--are shaping home care information technology solutions that emphasize data entry at the point of care.

As laboratories become increasingly market-driven lab managers and IT professionals are looking for ways IT can help them do more with less--and do it more efficiently and faster--to help ensure their survival.

Managed care is motivating providers to explore ways to reduce costs by improving performance at the point of care. One increasingly popular tool: portable and wireless computers and software to help capture clinical data.

With automated education tools clinicians can give patients the information they need to manage their own care when they need it most--after the office visit. Next step: integrated educational-treatment systems that tailor information to discreet aspects of a patient's condition and link them to vast data resources.

Outcomes assessment tools like data repositories and benchmarking databases can help cut the cost of care. More tools are on the way. But clinicians who can't catch up may be the biggest barrier to more widespread use.

As recently as five years ago, home care providers who wanted to use information strategically had little choice but to build their own point-of-care applications. Today, as the number of home health agencies grows, so do the number of home health information systems.

Given the prominence that managed care will have in the future U.S. healthcare system, financial managers who want to advance their careers must take steps to hone their managed care knowledge and skills, become accomplished managed care strategists, and identify opportunities to gain expertise in the managed care field. Healthcare Financial Management interviewed a number of managed care experts to obtain their views on how healthcare financial managers can prepare for a career in managed care organizations. The experts agree that one of the keys to future success lies in financial managers' willingness to assume more and different types of responsibility than before as the shift to managed care continues.

Serious violations of ethical conduct by healthcare financial managers have made headlines over the past few years. Leaders in both the healthcare financial industry and the academic community believe these violations reflect the influence of the ambiguous ethical atmosphere of the 1980s, a breakdown in external and internal controls, and a failure of personal character on the part of a few individuals.