What Will It Take To Successfully Implement Health IT Solutions?

Incorporating health IT solutions to “fix” a troublesome healthcare system has long been touted as the backbone of healthcare reform. Health IT would not only greatly improve the delivery of care through increased performance, it could also largely pay for itself by introducing previously unheard of efficiencies.

A much cited RAND Corporation study in 2005 projected that rapid adoption of health IT solutions could save the United States more than $81 billion annually—savings that would help underwrite the government’s investment in health IT through the HITECH act, which provided financial incentives for the adoption of the electronic medical record (EMR).However, a recently released RAND study now presents a rather grim assessment of the current state of health IT. Despite wide investments nationally in EMRs and related tools, the cost-saving promise of health IT has still not been realized. Systems that are currently in place are neither interconnected nor easy to use.