Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) are at the heart of health care transformation. Everything we want to change and improve upon, hinges on the availability of EHRs in every hospital and every physician practice. We all know that EHRs can improve quality of care by providing evidence-based, patient-centered clinical decision support at the point of care, while measuring outcomes and customer satisfaction, so we can monitor and reward providers for their efforts. But this is not nearly enough. After all, our current health care crisis is not due to hundreds of thousands of citizens succumbing en masse to shoddy medical practices as much as it is due to having to squander 17% of GDP on pampering Americans with unnecessary, excessive and way too technologically advanced diagnostics and therapies. We must cut health care costs or perish. There could be an EHR for that. The following is a blueprint for transforming any EHR into a cost-cutting machine guaranteed to chop health care costs in half in less than one year of use.
Cost Awareness – There’s been much discussion lately revolving around small studies showing that when physicians are made aware of costs, they order fewer tests and save the system money, and it was suggested that EHRs can help place costs of everything in front of ordering providers. Absolutely. There is a tiny problem with obtaining true costs, as opposed to arbitrary prices, but in this era of Data Liberacion, surely we can summon the liberation of all insurance negotiated fee schedules. The innovative computer geeks can take it from there, and if we are missing some numbers here and there, we can make them up just as well as hospitals do. Armed with these data, the CPOE module will display the cost for every test about to be ordered, in a very patient-centered way, since we know what insurance the patient has. This in itself should also reduce disparities since Medicaid pays so much less for everything that we can easily order twice as many tests for Medicaid patients, for the same cost to society. Just so patients don’t feel disempowered, patient portals should clearly display tests and procedures costs as well. We could show the costs to their insurer, but a more deterring shock value would come from displaying the hospital list price, so patients can be better prepared in case the insurer decides to deny payments.Continue reading…