Overall, the numbers talk, but they don't tell the whole story, as there remains a "pervasive limitation" on how these health IT studies are conducted and reported, officials say.
"Much of the health IT literature still suffers from methodological and reporting problems that limit our ability to draw firm conclusions about why the intervention and/or its implementation succeeded or failed to meet expectations," the researchers concluded, citing authors who drew cause-and-effect conclusions from cross-sectional design studies.
"An even more pervasive limitation is the lack of reporting about key elements of context and implementation of health IT," they added.
For instance, contextual elements are often absent from the studies themselves, such as a hospital's financial position and staff education and training performed. Without such improvement of the reporting process, "We will tend to base conclusions about the effects of health IT primarily on studies examining narrow targets and will miss the potential effects on broader outcomes," officials wrote.
However, despite the findings by RAND officials, anecdotally, the evidence for health IT is
glaring for many. For instance, just last year Andrew Watson, MD, vice president of Pittsburg-based UPMC, noted a savings of $7,000 overall after implementing a telemedicine platform at an acute care community hospital. And that's after all the capital expense.
For the folks at Worcester, Mass.-based Reliant Medical Group, the $24 million EHR investment was also worth every penny, according to Larry Garber, MD, medical director for informatics.
When talking finances, Garber, speaking at an industry conference last May, cited the $2 million annual revenue increase the medical group saw just from increasing compliance rates for Medicare Advantage patients.
Their Epic EHR generates patient problem lists and has the ability to extract data from lab results. "We have alerts that remind us to put (lab results) in the problem list, and we have alerts that say, 'OK, so now that it's in the problem list, for billing, this is the right way to bill for those problems?'" Garber said.
This, he noted, is particularly important for Medicare Advantage patients, as physicians are paid for the diagnoses for those patients and the documentation they provide. So they have a tool automatically reminding staff which items haven't been diagnosed each year on the patient that are on the problem list, and the tool will automatically complete the documentation and billing.
As a result, the medical group has seen their compliance rate for chronic kidney disease Medicare Advantage patients surge from 20 percent to 84 percent within a three year period.
