By INTERSYSTEMS                                  SPONSORED CONTENT

How do you measure the ROI of a health information exchange? For Missouri Health Connection (MHC), the HIE serving Missouri and neighboring states, quantifying that elusive ROI for its participants is now a priority.

If you’re going to the CHIME15 Fall CIO Forum, you can see firsthand the work of our client, Mark Pasquale, President and CEO of MHC.

He has been in the HIE trenches and knows that calculating ROI is critical to winning new participants and physician adoption.  After investing government dollars to create infrastructure and services, HIEs must now demonstrate their value to participants. In this regard, MHC is taking a lead. Pasquale developed a spreadsheet calculator, based on metrics for healthcare costs that an HIE can prevent – numbers he drew from published studies.

Once users enter their own numbers into the calculator, it projects savings for emergency department visits and associated costs, outpatient and inpatient medical errors, readmissions, and malpractice litigation. MHC is now using onsite research and observation to gather real numbers on HIE savings.

To learn more about MHC efforts, join us for the CHIME15 Performance Institute Solutions Showcase (part of its CIO Forum),October 15-17, where we will be distributing copies of ourwhite paper on MHC. If you complete our survey on calculating ROI either at the conference or online, we will send you the MHC ROI Calculator.

Michael Painter is a senior program officer with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.