The Cost of National EHR
Government Health IT reported that full implementation of networked e-health records in U.S. doctors’ offices and hospitals could cost around $150 billion over eight years.
According to Robert Miller, a professor of health economics at the University of California, San Francisco, this $150 billion estimate is actually “manageable” because it amounts to less than a 1 percent increase per year in the nation’s total health care spending.
Miller said hospitals are further along the path toward implementing clinical information systems, partly because they get some boosts in revenues when they install EHRs. With hospital profit margins around 5 percent, most hospitals can afford it.
Miller’s projections call for hospitals to spend $35 billion to acquire and expand EHR systems and $55 billion in new operating costs over eight years. Financial incentives and reporting requirements are going to be key to getting useful data from EHR users, Miller said.
The Rand Corp. reported in 2005 that the total cost over 15 years would be $114 billion, an amount Rand said would be completely offset by cost efficiencies and other financial benefits of EHR use.
What you can do: HCIT PR practitioners may want to consider highlighting the ROI of their EHR solutions in contrast to all this talk about costs. For those vendors with low cost hosted solutions, take full advantage of this feature in comparison to the bigger and more expensive licensed solution vendors.
Posted by Shawn Whalen on August 15, 2008 at 12:30 PM
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