Recently, Jesdeep Bassi and Francis Lau of the University of Victoria (British Columbia) published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) another in a series of review articles that have been written in recent years to summarize the literature regarding the economic outcomes of investments in health information technology (HIT). Such articles answer the questions
- “How much do various HIT technologies cost?”
- “How much do they save?”
- “Are they worth the investment?”
They reviewed 5,348 citations found through a mix of automated and manual search methods, and selected a set of 42 “high quality” studies to be summarized. The studies were quite diverse, including a mix of types of systems evaluated, methods of evaluation, and measures included. The studies included retrospective data analyses and some analyses based on simulation models. The studies included 7 papers on primary care electronic health record (EHR) systems, 6 on computer-based physician order entry (CPOE) systems, 5 on medication management systems, 5 on immunization information systems, 4 on institutional information systems, 3 on disease management systems, 2 on clinical documentation systems, and 1 on health information exchange (HIE) networks.
Key results:
- Overall, 70% of the studies showed positive economic results, 24% were inconclusive, and 6% were negative.
- Of 15 papers on primary care EHR, medication management, and disease management systems, 87% showed net savings.
- CPOE, immunization, and documentation systems showed mixed results.
- The single paper on HIE suggested net savings, but the authors expressed doubts about the optimistic assumptions made in that analysis about a national roll-out in only ten years.
My take:
Bassi and Lau have made an important contribution to the field by establishing and documenting a very good literature review methodology – including a useful list of economic measures, a nice taxonomy of types of HIT, and many other tools which they graciously shared online for free in a series of appendices that accompany the article. They also made a contribution by doing some tedious work to sort through lots of papers and sorting and classifying the HIT economics literature.
But, I think they missed the point.
Like many others, Bassi and Lau have implicitly accepted the mental model that health information technology is, itself, a thing that produces outcomes. They evaluate it the way one would evaluate a drug or a cancer treatment protocol or a disease management protocol. Such a conceptualization of HIT as an “intervention” is, unfortunately, aligned with the way many healthcare leaders conceptualize their investment decision as “should I buy this software?” I admit to contributing to this conceptualization over the years, having published the results of retrospective studies and prospective analytic models of the outcomes resulting from investments in various types of health information technologies.
But, I think it would be far better for health care leaders to first focus on improvement to care processes — little things like how they can consistently track orders to completion to assure none fall through the cracks, bigger things like care transitions protocols to coordinate inpatient and ambulatory care team members to reduce the likelihood that the patient will end up being re-hospitalized shortly after a hospital discharge, and really big things like an overall “care model” that covers processes, organizational structures, incentives and other design features of a clinically integrated network. Once health care leaders have a particular care process innovation clearly in sight, then they can turn their attention to the health information technology capabilities required to enable and support the target state care process. If the technology is conceptualized as an enabler of a care process, then the evaluation studies are more naturally conceptualized as evaluations of the outcomes of that process. The technology investment is just a one of a number of types of investments needed to support the new care process. The evaluation “camera” zooms out to include the bigger picture, not just the computers.
I know this is stating the obvious. But, if it is so obvious, why does it seem so rare?
This inappropriate conceptualization of HIT as an intervention is not limited to our field’s approach to economic evaluation studies. It is also baked into our approach to HIT funding and incentives, such as the “Meaningful Use” incentives for investments in EHR technology, and the incentives created by HIT-related “points” in accreditation evaluations and designations for patient-centered medical home (PCMH), accountable care organizations (ACOs), organized systems of care (OSC), etc. The designers of such point systems seem conscious of this issue. The term “meaningful use” was intended to emphasize the process being supported, rather than the technology itself. But, that intention runs only about one millimeter deep. As soon as the point system designers put any level of detail on the specifications, as demanded by folks being evaluated, the emphasis on technology becomes instantly clear to all involved. As a result, the intended focus on enabling care process improvement with technology slides back down to a requirement to buy and install software. The people being evaluated and incentivized lament that they are being micromanaged and subject to big burdens. But they nevertheless expend their energies to score the points by installing the software.
So, my plea to Bassi and Lau, and to future publishers of HIT evaluation studies, is to stop evaluating HIT. Rather, evaluate care processes, and require that care process evaluations include details on the HIT capabilities (and associated one time and ongoing costs) that were required to support the care processes.
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