I was recently able to attend a press briefing with LeanTaaS and a couple CIO and Chief Transformation officers. During the event, Aaron Miri, SVP & Chief Digital and Information Officer at Baptist Health, said something quite powerful “It’s hard to argue with hard ROI and that’s what we got with LeanTaaS. The CFO asks you why you didn’t do it sooner.”
This seems so obvious when you read it. The problem is that this hasn’t always been the case for healthcare technology. Think about the history of IT. What’s the right ROI measurement for phones? How did you measure the ROI of implementing desktops? How did you measure the ROI of wireless internet? You didn’t really have to as people often compared it to cleaning staff that didn’t require an ROI, but were necessary.
Moving forward, how do you measure the ROI of EHRs? When I first started writing about EHRs, we were still working on that ROI calculation. It was starting to become more clear as I saw many move from wondering if they should implement an EHR to which EHR should they implement it and how they should implement it to get the most value. Then, we all know what happen. Meaningful Use and $36 billion of stimulus money blew everything up.
If you lived through that time, you know what I’m talking about. All this talk of ROI got shoved out the window as healthcare organizations chased the government money. It was amazing to me how irrational the EHR market became. I guess it wasn’t so much that ROI went out the window. It was the stimulus money changed the ROI equation that people stopped thinking about other forms of ROI and just focused on the stimulus payments.
My point here isn’t to discuss if this is right or wrong, but to highlight how much of health IT was and has been implemented without having to show a clear ROI. However, Miri’s quote above illustrates how this is changing and how it can change. No longer is IT just the team that keeps the light on. Instead, they can provide real appreciable revenue impact to a healthcare organization. That’s a big evolution for many in IT that haven’t embraced this ROI evolution yet.
Although, it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t just about technology. This was highlighted by Patrick McGill, MD, EVP & Chief Transformation Officer at Community Health Network, in the same briefing mentioned above when he said, “It’s as much about culture change as it is technology.” That’s right. ROI usually requires more than just implementing technology. Technology can be an extraordinary enabler to culture change, but just implementing technology often doesn’t produce a great ROI.
Sanjeev Agrawal, President & Chief Operating Officer at LeanTaaS, offered another reason we should be waking up to this required change in mindset. He said “The [healthcare] environment is getting more competitive. If you’re in a competitive environment, surgeons are going to take their cases where it’s more convenient to get surgical time.” This was obviously applied to the work LeanTaaS does, but the same is true with other technology that either makes physicians’ lives easier or worse.
Unfortunately, many of the technologies implemented in healthcare to date haven’t shown a great ROI and in some cases have made physicians’ lives worse. I don’t see another stimulus package coming down the road, so health IT companies are going to have to focus on the ROI they provide the way LeanTaaS is doing with their customers.
If you want a way to provide valuable ROI to an organization, Aaron Miri suggested that “The #1 return on investment for a physician is time.” One might argue that with staff shortages happening, this extra time and efficiency isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.
