A recent article reports findings
that uncertainty about Return on Investment (ROI) is a significant barrier to
the adoption of Electronic Health Records. In my last blog, I introduced a
monograph, “Measuring the Business Value of IT Investment,” by Craig Symons. He believes
that financial measures are not enough when making decisions about IT
investment. In that blog, I
presented his view about the lack of precision inherent in the financial
measures.
Symons further describes that IT
investments often provide intangible benefits which are hard to measure and so
are left out of financial measures. Let’s think from the clinician’s
perspective: No more trips to the record room; no more searching through pages
of lab results for the crucial information or struggling to read months even
years of hand-written progress notes to get the big picture of what is going on
with a patient. (FYI I worked mostly with schizophrenic people who had long often-complex
histories.) Confider that such delving into a difficult case would likely not
occur at all with a paper chart because the process is so cumbersome and
time-consuming. A well-designed EHR also provides decision support tools and links
to the universe of knowledge on the Internet.
Symons also notes that IT
investments produce not only immediate benefits but also provide opportunities
for future benefits. Consider the benefits
to quality and cost of care in the potential for communicating with other
providers. There is also the exciting opportunity to bring web-based
interactivity to the patient-provider relationship.
Seems that the intangible and
potential benefits truly deserve a place when thinking about an EHR implementation.
