Now that the first flush of excitement over the $19 billion in federal economic stimulus funding for healthcare IT has faded, healthcare finance professionals are beginning to ask questions about how and to what effect these stimulus funds will be put to use.
In his column in the March 2009 issue of hfm, HFMA president and CEO Dick Clarke questioned whether acceptance of stimulus funds might ultimately put healthcare executives in the same place that bank executives are in today: Facing the outrage of Congress and the public for a failure to “show the return” on healthcare IT stimulus monies. He cautioned that IT investment alone is unlikely to provide significant cost savings or ROI. Instead, IT investments must be part of an overall strategy to increase value by reducing costs and improving quality. “This strategy needs effective technological support to be successful,” Clarke noted. “But the technology alone will not ensure success.”
An op-ed in this week’s New York Times suggested the sort of contradictory logic healthcare executives might face down the road. Citing an article in the New England Journal of Medicine by David Blumenthal, President Obama’s new national coordinator of health information technology, the op-ed chided hospitals for being “appallingly slow to adopt electronic records.” Only later in the piece was it acknowledged that the “main impediment [to adoption of healthcare IT] is money.” Many hospitals, the article recognizes, do not have the capital for a $20 million to $200 million investment. And even if they do, they face high maintenance costs, an uncertain ROI, a lack of adequately trained staff, and resistance from physicians. Suddenly, the pace of healthcare IT adoption seems less appallingly slow.
A news story from HIMMS Analytics this week also suggests that the pace of healthcare IT adoption has not been so slow after all. Although few hospitals have all the desired functions of a healthcare IT system in place, HIMSS Analytics estimates that almost 70 percent are within two (or fewer) steps of what would be necessary to achieve “meaningful use” as defined by the economic stimulus legislation.
Healthcare IT is not going away, and hospitals will need to develop strategies to ensure its implementation. But before accepting healthcare IT funds, hospitals will be well advised to make sure they know how those funds will be put to use.
