News Feature | March 18, 2015

No Evidence HIEs Improve Costs

Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management Startup

A recent study has found a lack of evidence that HIEs actually reduce costs or improve quality of care.

Previously, a study presented to the American College of Emergency Physicians claimed having a HIE in place saved roughly $2,000 per patient. This included charges from repeated labs, radiology, consultations, and hospital admissions.

Now, a study published by Health Affairs suggests there is “little evidence” of widespread HIE use’s impact on cost and quality of care. “To determine how HIE has affected such health care measures as cost, service use, and quality, we identified twenty-seven scientific studies, extracted selected characteristics from each, and meta-analyzed these characteristics for trends,” explain researchers.

iHealth Beat reports they uncovered the following:

  • about 57 percent of examined analyses reported some type of outcomes benefit related to HIE
  • nearly 32 percent reported no significant effect on outcomes
  • about 11 percent reported a negative effect on health care outcomes

Despite over half of the studies reporting positive effects related to HIEs, researchers also point out that of those studies, the six strongest (which included randomized controlled trials and quasi-experiments) were less likely to find a positive correlation.

  • two studies found positive effects
  • three found no effect
  • one found negative effects

Fierce Health IT reports researchers did say continued adoption of Meaningful Use would likely lead to greater measurable benefits of HIEs. They also pointed out that studying HIE benefits was “extremely challenging in real-world situations where randomized control trials are frequently not feasible.” They even suggest the theory that benefits may have been over or underestimated due to the lack of related studies.

“Despite the abundance of observational studies finding a beneficial relationship between HIE and outcomes, there is currently no strong evidence to suggest that HIE is causally related to any widespread generalizable benefits,” wrote the research team. “Overall, little generalizable evidence currently exists regarding benefits attributable to HIE.”