Cleveland Clinic's experience of Electronic Health Records
The Huffington Post's investigation fund has been running a series of articles on Electronic Health records (required by 2014), and whether their implementation can lead to the care improvements and the cost savings envisaged by President Obama.
The President has praised the Cleveland Clinic for having "one of the best health information technology systems in the country" and holds it as a model for healthcare in America. As a result of this, the Huffington Post analysed their IT practices and how they developed and managed a system of Electronic Health Records throughout the clinic.
The video below examines whether the experiences of the Cleveland Clinic can, and should, be replicated across the country.
The Obama administration is current spending $45 billion to jump-start a national system of electronic medical records. They want doctors and hospitals to digitize their records within five years, as a means of improving care and achieving billions of dollars in savings.
Cost savings
WhileCleveland Clinic doctors say there is no doubt the switch to digital record-keeping has boosted the quality of care, they question whether they have saved money and reduced costs.
The Huffington Post notes how the Cleveland clinic has invested $100 million in IT over a decade, but cost savings have not materialized and hospital officials are not certain when they will. Whether their effort of digitizing records will save money is not altogether clear. This is consistent with some recent national studies that question whether electronic records can lead to lower medical spending:
A study of 4,000 hospitals published in November in the American Journal of Medicine--carried out by Harvard researchers who are some of the most prominent advocates of a single-payer healthcare system--found no cost savings or increased efficiencies with digital records. That was consistent with preliminary results from a separate study of 3,000 hospitals by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, who found no evidence of cost savings with electronic records.
The switch to Electronic Health Records (EHR) has received mixed reviews at hospitals around the country. Other countries, such as the UK, are already advanced in the development of EHRs, but are having their budgets cut as a result of delays and cost overruns. The Cleveland Clinic's experience shows that while EHR's can improve the quality of care and administration, they're not necessarily a panacea for reducing high healthcare costs.
