During today’s broadcast of The McLaughlin Group [1], there was a statistic tossed out about how $162 B would be saved annually by nationwide adoption of electronic medical records (attributed to the Rand Corporation). This number (or a similar number) is used frequently to urge us to adopt EMR software across healthcare.
This number raises a number of questions. The most obvious one is that this is enough money to give away EMR software to every medical office and institution across the country [2][3] - why isn’t someone putting one plus one together and getting “no risk financing for NHIN & office EHRs”? Another is whether there is a connection between EHRs and financing of healthcare to make the savings real.
Ultimately, the problem with the EHR savings issue is that the people saving the money are not the ones that have to pay for the EHR. Until these things are tied together, or consumers demand EHRs from their physicians and are willing to pay for it, the push will continue to be mandates from the government and push back from the market.
No answers yet, just questions...
Photo is of a chocolate soufflé at a very fancy French restaurant. like the one that could be affordable to the person who figures out how to divert 162B of healthcare savings to EMR modernization.
2 - general assumption based on total IT spending being around 30B annual. This is enough money for several years worth of spending in one pop. See http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=4242 .
3 - also assuming you could get everyone to agree on what EMR software was.
April 23, 2006
162 Billion Buys a Lot of EMR Software
Watching Healthcare IT
