Only 40% of Hospital CIO’s measure ROI on Their EMR Implementations

Today, I stumbled upon this fascinating tweet about hospital EMR ROI. It’s from @dbtech_Ras:

Unfortunately the tweet doesn’t contain the source of their information, but the idea of EMR ROI is a very interesting and important topic. Should a hospital CIO be tracking the ROI of their EMR implementation? Are most hospital CIO’s tracking EMR ROI?

I would imagine many hospital CIOs aren’t tracking EMR ROI, because they see EMR as a necessary requirement of being a hospital today. Do they track the ROI of cleaning supplies? No. They just realize they need them and they try to manage the cost of the supplies as best they can. I think many are treating EMR in this same manner. They see EMR as a necessity regardless of ROI.

The interesting thing is that there are actually a lot of ways to measure an ROI for EMR software. None of them are perfect and they certainly leave out all the intangibles and long term benefits of EMR. For example, how do you measure an ROI on legibility of charts? That’s tough. It’s also hard to predict how having your charts electronic will enable you to be a better hospital 5-10 years from now. Not to mention if reimbursement eventually will require an EMR. Things like this will happen I’m sure.

With those disclaimers, you still can calculate an ROI. The low hanging fruit is the EHR incentive money and the future EHR penalties for not having an EHR. These add up to really large numbers for hospitals. You can also look at productivity before and after the EHR. Of course, depending on how you implement the EMR, this could actually be a cost of EHR as opposed to a benefit. Either way it should be calculated in the ROI. There are many more.

From what I’ve seen everyone sees the future of physician documentation is going to be in an EMR. Just because the move to EMR is inevitable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still keep focused on the ROI you can receive from it.

Is your hospital tracking your EHR ROI?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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