The return on investment of health care information technology isn’t uniformly positive, according to a recent analysis from the Congressional Budget Office titled, Evidence on the Costs and Benefits of Health Information Technology.
The underlying rationale for the report, which was requested by the Senate Budget Committee, is to sort out the federal government’s role in health IT. The report asks, "Whether — and if the answer is yes, how — the federal government should stimulate and guide the adoption of health IT."
The federal government is already in the health care IT fray. President Bush set the goal in 2004 that every American have an electronic health record by 2014. This was a vision, however, without a funding source. There are also several proposals in Congress that would expand the federal government’s role in health IT by mandating the use of electronic prescribing, provide financial incentives to providers who use health IT, and offer grants to purchase systems for providers.
The CBO report points out a major benefit of health IT that has been largely overlooked: IT’s role in research on the comparative effectiveness of medical treatments and practices. When individuals’ health data is in electronic format, it can be depersonalized, aggregated, and analyzed for a range of uses, such as medical effectiveness, quality, and system efficiency, among other research questions.
One sentence in the 48-page report encapsulates the Mother of All Barriers to Health IT Adoption: "How well health IT lives up to its potential depends in part on how effectively financial incentives can be realigned to encourage the optimal use of the technology’s capabilities."
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