Pam Arlotto

Beyond Return on Investment: Expanding the Value of Healthcare Information Technology

Beyond Return on Investment expands on the topic first outlined in Return on Investment: Maximizing the Value of Healthcare Information Technology, a basic primer or “how to” on completing a ROI analysis for a single project. Beyond Return on Investment expands on the topic to address a comprehensive program of value-based information management for health systems today. Beyond Return on Investment provides lessons learned from healthcare IT adoption on how to drive value realization, look at healthcare IT as a strategic asset, achieve value from clinical systems, manage healthcare IT as an investment, analyze ROI to make the case for investment, and governing transformation toward integrated decision making. The book concludes with a look at the key trends that will drive value in the future, taking a look at IT’s impact on wellness and care delivery.

Click here to purchase your copy.

Don’t miss the next book in this series —Rethinking Return on Investment: The Challenge of Accountable Meaningful Use   which provides a look back at how the ROI of health IT has typically been measured and explores how Meaningful Use regulations are driving healthcare organizations to adopt a value-based purchasing model — thus challenging readers to rethink how they define the ROI of health IT.

Maestro Strategies

Consolidation, Clinical Integration & Transformation: Investing in Information Technology for an Accountable System of Care

Few argue the point that the American health care “system” is broken. Today’s fragmented non-system is based upon the decades-old idea that physicians, through a one-to-one relationship with the patient, will seek out and know the best care for each patient, and that hospitals through episodic, acute-care interventions are the centralizing point for the coordination of patient information. Waste, high cost, duplication, patient confusion and poor outcomes result from a variety of factors.

While accountable care organizations (ACOs), clinical integration networks and patient-centered medical homes are fast becoming the trend du jour, there is little doubt that a provider-led, population-based, coordinated care process that instills accountability for performance and measurement of quality, cost and patient experience is essential.

This monograph explores three stages most health care organizations will go through as they build or become part of an accountable system of care. The concept of the care management platform is introduced and key information technology investments are identified for each stage. Finally, assessment questions are provided for trustees to critically examine their own organization’s progress at each stage.

Published by The American Healthcare Association’s Center for Healthcare Governance

To download a copy of the whitepaper, click here.

hfm

Accelerating the ROI of EHRs

Healthcare leaders should rethink their organizations’ approaches to managing the change associated with implementation of  electronic health records to gain greater value from these systems. After exploring the concept for more than a decade, research has shown that IT alone does not drive ROI. Health systems and physician groups that implement EHRs and wait for the promised returns will be disappointed. Facing dramatic changes to the healthcare industry such as consolidation, clinical integration, and population health management, we need to accelerate the ROI of EHRs, and clearly, that means rethinking the way we define, plan for, and manage the change associated with these advanced IT systems. We should start by recognizing that the value of IT is reflected in the ratio between the total IT and business investment and the degree of change in business and clinical outcomes that is realized from that investment. Click here to read the full article.

Hospitals & Health Networks

IT as a Strategic Resource

Hospitals, systems and physicians have made significant progress in implementing electronic health records and have received millions of dollars in meaningful use incentive payments.  Yet, as executives and healthcare trustees strategize to build patient centric systems of care to manage populations and make the transition from volume to value, most realize that they do not have the data they need to reduce costs, improve outcomes and coordinate care. Physician-led development and use of information technology and analytic tools are essential to harvesting information from EHRs and designing new care practices. That will enable providers to transform the way care is delivered and to achieve the full return on the substantial IT investments hospitals and physician practices have made.

Strategic Implications

Many organizations have focused on EHRs for the purpose of obtaining stimulus funds. IT has been viewed as an operational resource, and most trustees have left it to senior management to define direction. At best, boards have been passive recipients of reports on implementations rather than assertively asking how they can realize value and mitigate risk.

Yet, IT is integral to the way care will be delivered, managed and transformed, and it consumes the bulk of today’s capital expenditures for many hospitals and systems. As boards work to extend their oversight of transformation initiatives, it is important for them to understand the information and technology implications of each transformation strategy.

In this article in Trustee magazine, Pam Arlotto shows how, by asking a few key questions, healthcare trustees can become more effective in ensuring IT value realization and supporting the physicians who lead these efforts.

Read the full article here.