Hospitals Behind On EMR ROI Measurements

Buying an EMR is one of biggest investments a hospital IT department is likely to make. To date, however, few hospitals are planning for and implementing EMR ROI measures early in the game, according to a new study from Beacon Partners.

Beacon interviewed more than 300 healthcare leaders about the clinical system performance measures they used for their EMR, as well as the resulting ROI.  What researchers found out was that most respondents weren’t happy with their organization’s attempts to measure the ROI on their EMR spend — and that many hospitals aren’t directly measuring ROI at all.

According to healthcare leaders who spoke with Beacon, quality management and IT departments, rather than financial executives,  generally institute EMR performance measures. All told, 40 percent of respondents said that they were using performance measures, but only 36 percent were satisfied with the extent to which the data was being used to measure the value EMRs brought to their organization, Beacon reports.

The problem may spring from a lack of planning. According to Beacon’s respondents, less than half (48 percent) of performance measures are determined during planning.  In fact, 32 percent of providers said that performance measures were implemented in at least one patient care area post-EMR implementation.  Fifty-one percent of respondents said that they would have preferred to implement clinical system performance measures earlier than they had done so.

It’s hard to tell what would deter these healthcare execs —  mostly leaders with community hospitals — from demanding more results from their EMR investment. My best guess, though, is that adhering to Meaningful Use guidelines has taken up all of their bandwidth, and that CFOs have been mollified by the promise of incentive payments from the feds.

As the Beacon study suggests, though, healthcare leaders aren’t satisfied with this state of affairs. Vendors, expect to get more searching questions about ROI measurement over the next year or two.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

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