No hospital savings with electronic records-US study
November 20th, 2009 | by admin |* Harvard study: health IT doesn’t cut hospitals’ costs
* Data covers 4,000 hospitals from 2003 to 2007
* Slight boost seen in tracking quality of care
By Susan Heavey
WASHINGTON, Nov 20 (Reuters) - New electronic record systemsinstalled in thousands of U.S. hospitals have done little to reinin skyrocketing healthcare costs, Harvard University researcherssaid in a study released on Friday.
A review of roughly 4,000 hospitals from 2003 to 2007 foundthat while many had moved away from the paper files that stilldominate the U.S. healthcare system, administrative costs actuallyrose, even among the most high-tech institutions.
Advocates of such technology have been pushing for greater useof computerized health records to prevent costly errors and allowgreater coordination among caregivers and patients. But adoptionhas been slow, prompting Congress to offer $19 billion inincentives as part of an economic stimulus bill.
The results, published in The American Journal of Medicine,come as the Senate presses ahead with legislation to expand accessto healthcare. While the bill does not provide funds to buynecessary equipment, it does aim to facilitate their use and booststandards.
President Barack Obama has pointed to greater utilization ofe-health records to help generate savings at a time when thenation’s healthcare costs far outpace inflation.
But lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professorat Harvard Medical School, and his team found so far the savingsare not there.
“Our study finds that hospital computerization hasn’t saved adime, nor has it improved administrative efficiency,” saidHimmelstein, who oversees clinical computing at Cambridge Hospitalin Massachusetts. “Claims that health IT will slash costs and helppay for the reforms being debated in Congress are wishfulthinking.”
The push for wider electronic medical records affectscompanies like Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O ) and Google Inc (GOOG.O ) toothers such as McKesson Corp (MCK.N ) and Allscripts MisysHealthcare Solutions Inc (MDRX.O ).
National government standards for many health IT products aredue next month. But even with the passage of the stimulus bill’sfunds, many experts expect it to take years before most Americanshave an electronic health record.
The researchers found administrative costs increased slightlyfrom 24.4 percent in 2003 to 24.9 percent in 2007, with facilitiesthat computerized the most quickly seeing the largest jump.Hospitals with the highest costs tended to be smaller, for-profit,non-teaching ones in cities, they added.
Computerized records have yet to prove more efficient “becausethe commercial marketplace does not favor optimal products,”creating programs to focus more on codes and billing than doctors’needs and patient care, they said.
Electronic records did show some improvements in tracking thequality of care delivered in cases of heart attacks, but it wasunclear if those measure actually translated into improvements inpatients’ health, they said. Continued…
