“No aspect of health IT entails as much uncertainty as the magnitude of its potential benefits.”
A few years into the Meaningful Use program, it seems this quote from a 2008 Congressional Budget Office report entitled “Evidence on the Costs and Benefits of Health Information Technology” may have been written with the assistance of a crystal ball.
Fast forward to 2013.
“Just from reading a week’s worth of news, it’s obvious that we don’t really know whether healthcare IT is better or worse off than before [Meaningful Use incentives],” popular blogger and health IT observer Mr. HIStalk wrote earlier this year.
So, perhaps RAND was hypnotized by Cerner funding when they created their rosy prognosis (hearken back, if you will, to 2005 and the projected $81 billion in annual healthcare savings). Maybe they were just plain wrong and the most recent RAND report stands as a tacit mea culpa.
Either way, we’re left with hypotheses that, while not incontrovertible, are gaining traction:
- Health IT benefits will manifest gradually over an extended timeframe.
- Those benefits will not quickly morph into reduced costs, if they ever do.
- Because of 1 and 2, investing in a hugely expensive electronic health record system is potentially risky.
How risky? Without question, massive health IT expense and the predominant proprietary IT model are threats to a hospital or health system’s financial viability, to its solvency.
We’re seeing some examples even now.
