Health IT Doesn’t Save As Much As Hoped Due To Interoperability Failures

Does health IT actually save money for health organizations?  That’s a billion-dollar question — one which the whole Meaningful Use program rises or falls, I’d argue — but it still hasn’t been resolved. For what it’s worth, though,  here’s some thoughtful input on the subject.

According to a new study appearing in the journal Health Affairs, always the class act of the health policy game, health IT isn’t generating cost savings because of slow adoption and limited interoperabilityiHealthBeat reports. The research was conducted by the RAND Corporation.

Specifically, RAND researchers say, the productivity and cost benefits of health IT have been held back by:

* Slow adoption
* Reluctance of many clinicians to burn the midnight oil needed to truly master such systems
* Failure of the healthcare system as a whole to implement process changes needed to realize health IT system benefits

Another big issue is lack of interoperability between many health IT systems, the RAND researchers said. They note that previous predictions about health IT savings assumed that systems would be connected, thereby increasing efficiency.

To get savings from health IT, the U.S. healthcare industry needs to do the following, RAND says:

* Patients should be able to access their electronic health data and share those records with other health care providers
* Health care providers should be able to easily use health IT systems across different health care settings
* Health information stored in one IT system should be retrievable by health care providers that are part of other health care    systems
* Health IT systems should be set up to support — rather than hinder — the work of clinicians

No one of these points should come as a surprise, but given the stakes involved, it doesn’t hurt to hammer them home again. The whole interoperability “thing” isn’t going away…

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

  • ” * Reluctance of many clinicians to burn the midnight oil needed to truly master such systems..”
    This is nonsense. Physicians of all ages have demonstrated their abilities to master many other devices and systems, including PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other hardware and software products. These same docs are still struggling with most, if not all EHRs. The above statement * is a favorite excuse used by healthcare IT management/vendor/trainer/implementation team. EHRs are flawed for many reasons, one being that these products are created by persons far removed from health care.

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