Most of the time, hospital M&A is sold as an exercise in saving money by reducing overhead and leveraging shared strengths. But new data from PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that IT integration costs can undercut that goal substantially. (It also makes one wonder how ACOs can afford to merge their health IT infrastructure well enough to share risk, but that’s a story for another day.)
In any event, the cost of integrating the IT systems of hospitals that merge can add up to 2% to the annual operating costs of the facilities during the integration period, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. That figure, which comes to $70,000 to $100,000 per bed over three to five years, is enough to reduce or even completely negate benefits of doing some deals. And it clearly forces merging hospitals to think through their respective IT strategies far more thoroughly than they might anticipated.
As if that stat isn’t bad enough, other experts feel that PwC is understating the case. According to Dwayne Gunter, president of Parallon Technology Solutions — who spoke to Hospitals & Health Networks magazine — IT integration costs can be much higher than those predicted by PwC’s estimate. “I think 2% being very generous,” Gunter told the magazine, “For example, if the purchased hospital’s IT infrastructure is in bad shape, the expense of replacing it will raise costs significantly.”
Of course, hospitals have always struggled to integrate systems when they merge, but as PwC research notes, there’s a lot more integrate these days, including not only core clinical and business operating systems but also EMRs, population health management tools and data analytics. (Given be extremely shaky state of cybersecurity in hospitals these days, merging partners had best feel out each others’ security systems very thoroughly as well, which obviously adds additional expenses.) And what if the merging hospitals use different enterprise EMR systems? Do you rip and replace, integrate and pray, or do some mix of the above?
On top of all that, working hospital systems have to make sure they have enough IT staffers available, or can contract with enough, to do a good job of the integration process. Given that in many hospitals, IT leaders barely have enough staff members to get the minimum done, the merger partners are likely costly consultants if they want to finish the process for the next millennium.
My best guess is that many mergers have failed to take this massive expense into account. The aftermath has got to be pretty ugly.
