HFMA VIEWS

With $19 billion in economic stimulus recovery money about to enter the health IT pipeline, concerns about how that money will be spent and to what effect are beginning to appear in the news. A series of articles published online by Health Affairs this week, for example, offered a few cautionary notes for President Obama and the 111th Congress.

Mark Frisse of Vanderbilt University warned that health IT cannot simply automate a broken system, and called for an “incremental, realistic” approach to health IT adoption. And David Brailer, the first National Coordinator for Health Information Technology for former President George W. Bush, expressed concern that Congress is now pushing for adoption without focusing on how to ensure that systems can communicate with one another and create meaningful, useful information.

Also this week, two faculty members at Harvard Medical School questioned projected savings of $80 billion annually from health IT adoption in a March 12 Wall Street Journal op-ed (subscription required). While acknowledging that electronic health records offer some undisputed benefits--especially in their ability to warn of potential adverse prescription drug reactions--they argued that true cost reduction will instead require hard decisions on issues such as the uninsured’s use of emergency departments for primary care and the extensive use of intensive care units at the end of life.

For those looking to climb aboard the health IT bandwagon at a bargain price, Wal-Mart offered some good news. The New York Times reported that Wal-Mart plans to team its Sam’s Club division with computer-supplier Dell and software-supplier eClinicalWorks to offer electronic health record systems to small physician groups at an estimated cost of under $25,000 for the first physician and about $10,000 for each additional physician.