Dive Brief:
- While there is really no debate in the healthcare community that health IT is a critical piece of the present and future of healthcare, putting a finger on the exact value in a qualitative matrix is proving a bit elusive, according to a study published recently in the American Journal of Managed Care.
- The study examines the issue across three key contexts: Value includes both costs and benefits; Value accrues over time; and value depends on which stakeholder's perspective is used.
- "Healthcare organizations all over the United States are adopting health information technology (HIT), yet recent studies of HIT are often unhelpful to these organizations or to those making policy decisions," stated the portion of the study titled Take-away Points. "Most studies fail to use adequate measures of value or to report key contextual and implementation characteristics. In this commentary, we: Demonstrate the problem in a sampling of published articles; Propose a conceptual framework and principles for measuring value in HIT; Present a checklist of key study characteristics."
Dive Insight:
This is not a study that examines the value of health IT, but rather, a study that examines how other studies determine value, and finds those studies lacking.
The primary issue this study discusses is the lack of any kind of standard measuring tool across the other IT studies, and these researchers conclude that the lack of these standards is causing the other value-based studies to draw incomplete or incorrect conclusions.
From our perspective, health IT is situational and particular to the provider using it. Those who use IT don't always use it for the same reasons, nor do they anticipate identical outcomes as others using similar technologies. That was the point the ACP was making in its highly critical position paper on the use of EHRs, putting a fine point on the fact that not all EHRs are as patient-centric as the college believes they should be.
While helpful to those researchers who are trying to come up with those standards, this study revealed nothing about the actual value of health IT, and that's a critical distinction. It's not that the jury is still out on the value of IT in healthcare. We just haven't come up with a rating system for value that works, yet.