Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Is Health IT Worth it?
Congratulations to Colene Byrne, Blackford Middleton and their colleagues for a fine paper in Health Affairs about The Value from Investments in Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. They calculated that the VA has saved over $3 billion from their investments in VISTA and other IT. By investing more (and perhaps more wisely) than private sector, the government has achieved efficiencies that the big corporations delivering health care haven't been able to find yet. I take that as cause for optimism.
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The study’s authors note that the VA has the advantage of a unique, integrated structure that is hard to match in the private sector. However, this assumption is no longer valid. Technology advances now enable the creation of “virtual care delivery networks” that allow non-affiliated hospitals, primary care physicians, specialists, insurance companies, labs, imaging centers and others to coordinate care in a manner similar to the VA.
ReplyDeleteAt my company, Medicity, we’re creating similar technology. In fact a study we did validated the same type of cost savings seen by the VA. We found that physician practices and hospitals saved $1.2 million annually in a data exchange scenario between four hospitals and 11 clinics/practices.
Read the Medicity study in full at: http://infosite.medicity.com/Info/Whitepapers_and_Briefs.aspx