Is There a Case to Be Made that Interoperability Saves Hospitals Money?

Back in 2013 I argued that we needed a lot less talk and a lot more action when it came to interoperability in healthcare. It seemed very clear to me then and even now that sharing health data was the right thing to do for the patient. I have yet to meet someone who thinks that sharing a person’s health data with their providers is not the right thing to do for the patient. No doubt we shouldn’t be reckless with how we share the data, but patient care would improve if we shared data more than we do today.

While the case for sharing health data seems clear from the patient perspective, there were obvious business reasons why many organizations didn’t want to share their patients health data. From a business perspective it was often seen as an expense that they’d incur which could actually make them lose money.

These two perspectives is what makes healthcare interoperability so challenging. We all know it’s the right thing to do, but there are business reasons why it doesn’t make sense to invest in it.

While I understand both sides of the argument, I wondered if we could make the financial case for why a hospital or healthcare organization should invest in interoperability.

The easy argument is that value based care is going to require you to share data to be successful. That previous repeat X-ray that was seen as a great revenue source will become a cost center in a value based reimbursement world. At least that’s the idea and healthcare organizations should prepare for this. That’s all well and could, but the value based reimbursement stats show that we’re not there yet.

What are the other cases we can make for interoperability actually saving hospitals money?

I recently saw a stat that 70% of accidental deaths and injuries in hospitals are caused by communication issues. Accidental deaths and injuries are very expensive to a hospital. How many lives could be saved, hospital readmissions avoided, or accidental injuries could be prevented if providers had the right health data at the right place and the right time?

My guess is that not having the right healthcare data to treat a patient correctly is a big problem that causes a lot of patients to suffer needlessly. I wonder how many malpractice lawsuits could be avoided if the providers had the patients full health record available to them. Should malpractice insurance companies start offering healthcare organizations a doctors a discount if they have high quality interoperability solutions in their organization?

Obviously, I’m just exploring this idea. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Can interoperability solutions help a hospital save money? Are their financial reasons why interoperability should be implemented now?

While I still think we should make health data interoperability a reality because it’s the right thing to do for the patients, it seems like we need to dive deeper into the financial reasons why we should be sharing patient’s health data. Otherwise, we’ll likely never see the needle move when it comes to health data sharing.

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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