"The Economics of IT and Hospital Performance" report by PricewaterhouseCoopers analyzed data from nearly 2,000 U.S. hospitals. It concluded that IT investment must reach a tipping point -- usually at least two years -- before operational performance improvements occur.
Before that time, hospitals incur operating costs with little near-term financial benefit, according to the report by the New York-based consulting firm.
Mark Frisse, a professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said that the report "adds a dose of realism" to the issue of health IT.
He noted that health care organizations must first realize that making IT effective involves much more than purchasing and putting into place an IT system.
"One of the reasons why some implementations take so long and some implementations fail is that they are viewed as data processing problems and not -- as they should be -- as information management problems," said Frisse, who is working to develop a regional health information organization in Tennessee.
Health care workers often don't easily adapt to new technologies because they can require an abrupt transition from a system "that seems to be fairly effective to a system of care that may in theory be better but which has not been witnessed by those who are asked to put their work -- and their patients' lives -- at stake," he added.
According to the report, "hospital management should not justify expensive new IT investments purely on the assumption that these investments will create huge and rapid paybacks for the organization."
Today, six of 10 hospitals are at or nearing the tipping point, the report said, and industrywide cost reductions and quality improvements from IT investment may soon begin to become more widely apparent.
J. Marc Overhage, CEO and president of the Indianapolis-based Indiana Health Information Exchange Inc. (IHIE), agreed that the ROI for health IT does take a long time to accrue, making it difficult for management to have a "good expectation that they will achieve a return."
The IHIE works with area hospitals and health care providers to exchange patient records electronically.
Overhage said that part of the problem for health care organizations is that upgrading IT systems requires changing established processes.
"Hospitals have to re- engineer processes enabled by IT and follow through with the changes that are required to achieve the value," he said. "This follow-through is at least as challenging as putting the IT into place."
Computerworld (US)
