To attract the widest range of experts in the development of evidence reports and health technology assessments, AHRQ encourages EPCs to enter into partnerships and collaborations with other medical and research organizations. EPCs work with these partner organizations to ensure that the evidence reports and technology assessments they produce become building blocks for quality improvement projects in healthcare across the country. “Healthcare providers need reliable information that tells them what to expect when they implement healthcare IT systems,” said AHRQ President Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D. Today, healthcare technology offers significant potential benefits to hospitals, caregivers, and patients.

Empirical evidence from these types of studies suggests that medical technology is responsible for about 10 to 40 percent of the increase in health care spending over time. Fuchs concluded that technology contributed 0.6 percentage points to the 8.0 percent annual increase in health spending from 1947 to 1967. Davis found that technology accounted for about 25 percent of the increase in hospitalization costs between 1962 and 1968. Using a disease-specific approach, Scitovsky and McCall found that, from 1951 to 1971, changes in rising costs in treatments generally outweighed cost-saving changes.

Since HMOs are paid flat per member, they have incentives to consider the long-term economic and health consequences of decisions on new technologies. In addition, capitated plans provide patient care in both the outpatient and inpatient settings. While the widespread implementation of EHR is encouraging, one has to wonder if the adoption of healthcare IT has helped achieve the true purpose of the HITECH Act. I would argue that, while imperfect, Health IT has helped healthcare providers, at least in part, improve patient care and reduce costs. Technology is also becoming an essential part of caring for people with chronic conditions or disabilities.

It is widely believed that the introduction of EHR systems is critical to the delivery of consistent, high-quality healthcare, although the current use of EHRs is limited. The findings in all these studies mainly related to implementation processes and changes in clinical processes. The ability of one aspect of HIT, the electronic health record, to improve the quality of care in outpatient care facilities. The ability to generalize the effects of a HIT intervention on the costs and benefits in existing systems for the use of the technology by other healthcare organizations. The authors conclude that scientific assessments have shown significant improvements in the quality of healthcare using healthcare IT systems. However, these successes have occurred primarily in large healthcare systems that have created their own healthcare IT systems and have devoted significant commitment and resources to these efforts.

A new drug or device, on the other hand, may be more expensive to buy, but less expensive to administer than the alternatives. A new imaging device may lead to greater use of other tests to confirm a diagnostic hypothesis that otherwise would not have arisen, or new technology may make other diagnostic procedures unnecessary. Treatments that would not have been considered may be induced by a new diagnostic test, or treatments may be avoided because the new technology offers an alternative course of action. Technologies and their induced procedures can lead to side effects and complications that require additional testing and treatment, or side effects and complications can be avoided if the new technology leads to a safer clinical strategy than was possible in their absence. Life-extending technology may require a longer attention span, often at a high cost and in institutional settings. Technology that prevents the disease can save resources that would otherwise be needed for diagnosis and treatment, although few preventive technologies generally save costs.

The main quantifiable benefits of an EHR system were savings in capturing and accessing data; decision support to improve the efficiency, quality and safety of care; business management related to personnel, billing and overhead; and streamlining the flow of patients. Comparing your progress notes with a predefined reference standard during both phases. The authors showed that after adjusting for covariants, PDA-based graphs reduced the discrepancies in the patient’s weight on the graphs, but did not affect the number of medications or vascular line differences. Before they are administered, 20, 21 – Infants and children have a higher risk of serious medication and resulting medication errors than adults. HIT is believed to be an essential component in the quest to improve drug safety in pediatrics.

Another important limitation is the lack of description regarding workflow reengineering and organizational changes that were necessary for the use of EHR. As discussed above, the “intervention” in these studies is not only the EHR system, but also the way these systems change the way caregivers work, organizations function, and consumers receive care. This information is very context-specific and in order to make EHR research results more broadly generalizable, this part of the “intervention” needs to be characterized, described and measured more accurately and comprehensibly. Without this process implementation data, the applicability of findings from one context to another will be an impediment to informed decision-making.

First, on average, new technologies improve the quality of health care by improving health outcomes. This is not true for all technologies in all clinical applications, but it is true on average. Second, many new technologies are ineffective or redundant and do not improve health outcomes. The clinical trials problem is that it’s not always easy to distinguish between effective and ineffective technologies at the time they’re introduced. Some technologies can even reduce costs by replacing more expensive alternatives or avoid costly health consequences, but the overall effect is that costs rise.