JO: We don’t know. The National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, David Blumenthal, will make that decision.
TL: How much will these payments be?
JO: Payments won’t start until 2011 and will range from about $40,000 to $65,000 for doctors. For hospitals, we’re talking about millions of dollars.
TL: What is the projected penetration of electronic medical records after the stimulus money takes effect?
JO: The Congressional Budget Office believes that we can reach 90 percent in a relatively short period. By 2019, we can get up to 90 percent for doctors and around 70 percent for hospitals.
TL: Who really benefits from all this money?
JO: The stimulus package calls for $19 billion to be spent over five years. The industries that make the technology and firms that consult with providers on how to use it will surely benefit.
TL: Won’t patients benefit too? Can you give some specifics?
JO: If electronic medical records improve patient care by reducing errors or other problems, then, yes, patients can benefit too. Health IT does have the potential to improve quality of care. Whether that potential will be realized is, however, a very different issue.
TL: Will all this money thrown at IT really reduce the rate of spending on health care, as some believe?
JO: No. Chances are it’s not going to save huge amounts of money.
TL: What do you mean by huge?
JO: The health care cake is very big. IT spending is not even the icing. We spend about $2.5 trillion on health care every year, and it would cost about $125 to 150 billion annually to pay for subsidies that enable all the uninsured to have health insurance. So $19 billion over five years is, comparatively speaking, not a lot of spending. The savings from this investment are likely to be a very small percentage of total health care bill. Health IT is not likely to substantially slow the growth of spending, though it still is worth doing as part of the effort to improve quality.
TL: Haven’t there been studies that show savings in some systems?
JO: There have been studies that show electronic medical records have saved money in the Kaiser Permanente and VA systems. But most American health insurance does not look like Kaiser or the VA. In fact, American health care is not a system. Promoting health IT here is harder than in countries that have single-payer systems, or in closed arrangements like Kaiser and the VA.
TL: How much would the federal government save in its health programs if IT were widely adopted?
JO: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the HIT provisions of the stimulus legislation could reduce federal spending on health care benefits by about $13 billion over the next decade. But the program will cost about $32 billion to implement in Medicare and Medicaid, so spending on HIT will increase the deficit by $19 billion or so during that decade.
TL: Do other countries count on health IT to control health care expenditures?
JO: There is no evidence that other countries spend less because they use electronic medical records more than us (and they do). Countries that use electronic records controlled costs better long before there were such records.
TL: Why is this lack of evidence overlooked by politicians and, to some extent, the press?
JO: It’s an attractive solution for policy makers and politicians, so it has been overhyped.
TL: Why is it so attractive?
JO: Health IT sounds like a rational, sensible, and technical solution—and most important, it doesn’t appear to take on vested interests or stakeholders like health insurers. That makes it politically useful as a solution. It also promises to improve the quality of care, and politicians like solutions that both control costs and improve quality.
TL: Can you amplify this dual solution a bit more?
JO: Cost control involves pain. So if you have pleasure—in this case, meaning better quality—that means you can run for reelection on something positive. When you run for reelection, you don’t want to run on pain and lost income for constituents. When you’re doing something that sounds better, it’s a win-win.
Here are similar views from the mainstream:
http://www.tinyurl.com/hit-misadventure
#1 Posted by MedInformaticsMD, CJR on Fri 22 May 2009 at 06:40 PM
Mr. Oberlander's points about cost savings are very valid. Cost savings will occur when systems are integrated and aligned to allow audit metrics to look for fraud, but more importantly to eliminate the multiplicity of health plans that require gatekeepers at every process step to check the validity of insured and the healthcare procedure being undertaken. A comprehensive, universal national plan will save more in admin gatekeeper salaries then it will cost in additional medical claims of the formerly uninsured/underinsured. Innumerable computer modelings have proven that.
The next cost savings has to be universal standardized reimbursement claims forms so that providers do not have to spend 10% of their reimbursement revenue trying to collect from the insurers. Around 2000 there existed over 1,500 different health insurers, Medicare and a form of Medicaid in each state. Each of those agencies had different claims forms.
And then there is the issue of actuarial risk factors that are based isolated segments of insured populations rather then on the overall population but are the basis of premiums in most cases. These risk factors are so unreliable that insurers add additional weighting risk factors to assure they will not encounter any unplanned medical losses. All of this means that private health insurer premiums are substantially overstated and there is no data collection or tracking to correct this situation.
Finally there is the fact that only 35% of national health expenditures go thru the hands of private insurers so the statement that reform would be to disruptive if private insurers disqualified from practicing as they do today is pure unadulterated rubbish.
#2 Posted by Gerald Hunt, CJR on Tue 14 Jul 2009 at 06:40 PM