Can HIT's Value Be Quantified?
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
A study in the American Journal of Managed Care finds there must be a more comprehensive list of metrics in order to really understand the value of health IT.
Many studies are limited by the factors used to measure the value of health IT, according to a study published by the American Journal of Managed Care.
Study authors write, “Systematic reviews of HIT have found that the evidence for value is inconclusive and that existing studies suffer from major limitations. This finding is true even of the most recent literature reviews, despite a greatly increasing number of studies evaluating HIT.”
According to iHealth Beat, oftentimes studies base the value of health IT on:
- cost savings
- health outcomes
- safety improvements
- others
Healthcare IT News reports study the authors suggest these three principles be used to better determine the value of health IT:
- value includes both costs and benefits
- value accrues over time
- value depends on which stakeholder's perspective is used
“Unfortunately, we have found that few studies include both costs and benefits in their definitions of value,” the authors wrote. “Most studies look at only short-term time horizons, which ignore many of the downstream benefits of the HIT, and many studies don't even explicitly state to whom the value is accruing.”
“Without more attention to the necessary measuring and reporting of the data needed to assess value,” they add, “we risk the possibility of three more years' worth of published studies, which we estimate would be more than 300 hypothesis-testing articles that do not give us appreciably better knowledge about this crucial aspect of HIT: how best to realize value.”