Electronic records no panacea for health care industry
Share with others:
It has become health care industry dogma that electronic records can help improve efficiency. Reduce errors. Save lives. And -- just maybe -- put the brakes on runaway health costs, by allowing better sharing of patient information and eliminating duplicative services.
It's why hospitals and physicians' practices across the country want a piece of the $27 billion in federal stimulus incentive money to help doctors move their systems away from papers and manila file folders and toward computerization.
It's why Highmark and West Penn Allegheny Health System recently announced a partnership with Allscripts and Accenture to provide Pittsburgh's independent physicians with electronic health records.
And it's why, starting in 2015, hospitals and doctors face cuts to their Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements if they haven't adopted "meaningful" health information technology hardware, electronic prescribing systems and other elements of President Barack Obama's Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health act, known as HITECH.
Moving to a fully electronic system, Mr. Obama told Congress in February 2009 -- citing a 2005 Rand Corp. study -- could net $80 billion annual savings for the health system.
But do electronic records systems fully deliver on their promise? It's not uncommon for doctors, especially those from smaller practices, to complain about the computerization process itself -- it takes time and money to overhaul operations. Change is often unwelcome.
But it's also becoming more common to question whether the measures themselves will meet their lofty expectations. More and more studies are questioning the efficacy of electronic health records, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has begun collecting reports involving electronic health and IT errors, some of which have resulted in death.
"I don't think that we are getting our money's worth from all this treasury that we are spending," said Jaan Sidorov, Harrisburg-based health care consultant.
"The thing about these systems is that it doesn't really look like they're getting any cheaper," he said. "And the upgrades and the upkeep represents a very significant cost, especially in outpatient clinics."
First Published August 7, 2011 12:00 am
