Federal regulations including the Affordable Care Act are pushing demand on local health care information technology departments to an all-time high, according to Dayton-area IT leaders.

ACA requirements that include putting consumer information online and linking payments to quality outcomes represent a “real shift” in health care IT, said Mikki Clancy, Premier Health Partners vice president and chief information officer.

“Ten years ago health care IT was just getting a bill out the door so that it could be paid, and accepting the money,” Clancy said Wednesday at an IT forum at the Sinclair Ponitz Center. “Now it is everything about how a facility, a physician, a patient interacts with the health care system.”

The forum presented by Technology First, a regional IT trade association, addressed the ACA’s impact on hospitals, insurance companies and other affiliated agencies. Speakers also included Paul Stoddard, CareSource’s chief information officer, and David Morgan, Graceworks Lutheran Service’s director of technology and information systems.

Insurance payments related to quality outcomes and patient experience require hospital IT staff to provide real-time data to doctors and nurses, rather than charting their performance after the fact, Clancy said.

Medicaid providers such as CareSource are turning to data analytics to “understand all that rich data around the care that the member receives,” Stoddard said.

Stoddard said the ability to trade data is critical for health care providers and payment companies to meet federal mandates for integrated health systems. However, the health care industry is “woefully behind” other industries in terms of establishing universal technology standards, he said.

Clancy equated current health care IT standards to those of the banking industry when it first installed automated teller machines that could communicate among different financial institutions.