Did the stimulus package drop $19 billion down the rabbit hole? The law, which contained $19 billion worth of incentives designed to nudge doctors and hospitals to switch to electronic medical records. However, a new Harvard study shows the investment may have been misspent.
An analysis of 3,000 hospitals that has adopted electronic patient records showed barely a blip in cost savings or quality of care.
“The way electronic medical records are used now has not yet had a real impact on the quality or cost of health care,” lead researcher Ashish K. Jha, assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, told the New York Times.
For example, when comparing the length of hospital stays, Jha and his team found that at hospitals with full-featured digital records, the average length of stay was 5.5 days, compared to 5.7 days at hospitals
Certainly, Dr. Jha’s study isn’t the end all, be all analysis in this area, but for $19 billion, I want a better return than .2 days. That’s what – an hour or two? I think we need a fact-finding mission to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
