Health IT
Evaluating HIT, eHealth
Started by Anuj Dalal on 26 Aug 2009
This article makes an important point about eHealth and HIT in general: health IT applications should be viewed as interventions just as drugs administered to patients, and in this respect should be evaluated in arguably similar ways that we evaluate diagnostics and therapeutics.
There are plenty of examples of how such intervetions could result in patient harm (i.e., CPOE implementations creating workflow bottlenecks that resulted in increased mortality in at least one study).
What should evaluation focus on? hard patient outcomes are one measure, but one should also consider process, quality, productivity measures, and unintended consequences as well.
Anuj
Attached resource:
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Evaluating eHealth Interventions: (download, 172.3 KB) (click here for more details...) Source: PLoS Medicine
Keywords: eHealth, evaluation, Software
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Jonathan Payne
Anuj,
This FIT for EMR White Paper (http://www.slideshare.net/jjorgensenus/FITforEMRWhitePaper) contains a framework for evaluating both the "hard" and "soft" benefits of an EMR implementation. While some of the soft benefits (such as a possible increase in job satisfaction) may be difficult to assess in financial terms, many of them can be quantified. 16 benefits (each with citations) are categorized as either cost saving or revenue increasing.
This paper isn't exhaustive, but I think it's a good starting point for measuring EMR ROI.
Jon
1:40 AM, 28 Aug 2009 | Permalink
Aaron Beals
Jon, thanks for sharing the FIT for EMR whitepaper. I'm always encouraged to see these sorts of efforts toward quantification of ROI, which is the main concern of those making the I(nvestment) and yet one of the hardest areas to properly quantify.
One of the revenue-increasing ROI metrics referenced in the paper -- an increase in reimbursement claims due to cleaner data -- was cited by the Saraburi hospital in Thailand as one of their main tangible outcomes from implementing an EMR system. Prior to implementation, claims were often rejected by the Thai government for incomplete/incorrect data.
Has anyone in the community seen this benefit reported elsewhere?
3:28 PM, 25 May 2010 | Permalink