Study: Despite Huge Investment, Health IT
Has Long Way to Go
Use of health information technology (IT) has long been touted as a way to save money and improve patient care. Despite the huge investment in health IT, the lack of truly interoperable, easy-to-use systems has hindered the potential for savings—estimated at roughly $81 billion annually—promised by its widespread adoption, conclude two RAND Corporation researchers.
Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, the Paul O’Neill Alcoa Chair in Policy Analysis at RAND, and Spencer S. Jones, associate information scientist, say the United States won’t realize the substantial annual cost savings unless more standardized, user-friendly systems are introduced. “The failure of health information technology to quickly deliver on its promise is not caused by its lack of potential, but rather because of the shortcomings in the design of the IT systems that are currently in place,” says Kellermann.
They add that the slow rate of adoption has also prevented the country from realizing the full potential of health IT.
The authors provide three suggestions to guide future investments in health IT: ensure that health information stored in one IT system is retrievable by others; allow patients to have easy access to their electronic health information; and create systems that can be readily understood by busy clinicians.
The new analysis, which appears in the January edition of Health Affairs, comes more than seven years after another group of RAND researchers, led by Richard Hillestad, released a paper predicting that widespread adoption of health IT could eventually save the U.S. more than $81 billion each year through improved delivery and efficiency of healthcare. They also estimated that if 90% of doctors and hospitals were to adopt and successfully use HIT, the country would save $77 billion each year. An additional $4 billion in savings would result from fewer prescription errors as computers would alert pharmacists of potential mistakes .
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was critical of that 2005 study, stating in its own report that the RAND researchers failed to consider factors that might hamper the effective use of health IT. Furthermore, the analysis relied on empirical studies showing favorable cost effects for installing health IT systems while disregarding evidence of negative results, the CBO charged.
Interoperability and patient safety have been ongoing concerns for the health IT community. Last fall, AAMI and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held a joint two-day interoperability summit. It came about after AAMI and the FDA—who have joined forces before for healthcare technology summits, including one on medical alarm systems—noted that despite all of the focus on the information side of what technology can do, there has been scant attention paid to the device side of that connectivity, especially in relation to patient safety.
A report of that summit, titled Medical Device Interoperability: A Safer Path Forward, was just released and is available at www.aami.org/publications/summits/2012_Interoperability_Summit_Report.pdf.
Posted: January 16, 2013