Report: Widespread HIT could save $261B over 10 years

The stimulus-fueled expansion of health IT could save as much as $261 billion over the next 10 years and help form the basis of an interoperable, patient-centered health system that could yield more savings and better health outcomes, a recently released report suggests.

Such savings are contingent not only on widespread adoption of EHRs, but also on harnessing of health IT to provide clinical decision support, improve care coordination and provide safeguards against medical errors. "HIT's potential, as opposed to EHRs alone, does not center solely on making patients' records more accessible, but rather on improving the information available for medical decision making, collecting performance data, and ensuring that avoidable medical errors will be more difficult to occur," the report reads, according to InformationWeek.

"Data from EHR should also be more directly incorporated into comparative effective research (CER) collection. Ideally, a joint EHR-CER system would be applied on a nationwide level, with all hospitals, providers, and patients able to access their records in a seamless electronic framework, while addressing cyber security and privacy concerns," the research team adds.

The report, A 21st Century Roadmap for Advancing America's Health: The Path from Peril to Progress, from the Commission on U.S. Federal Leadership in Health and Medicine, a project of the private-sector Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, is the second in a series. It appears to be loosely modeled on the Institute of Medicine studies on the quality of care in America.

The researchers say the recently enacted insurance reform law lays some of the groundwork for true healthcare transformation by encouraging: national standards for electronic data submission and collection to help prevent fraud; standardized healthcare payment rules to reduce overhead; and development of state-level networks for secure health information exchange. (All have been addressed in previous laws, however, including the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.)

The report also calls for greater use of patient portals and for more consideration of "pay-for-value" reimbursement mechanisms, something not contained in this year's so-called "health reform" bill.

To learn more:
- check out this InformationWeek story
- view this report summary

Related Articles:
McKesson CIO: Health reform impossible without better information
Quality-based reimbursement deal gives hope for real reform
Chopra takes health IT efficiency message to Silicon Valley

Post a comment