A new study revealed that although electronic health records, or EHRs, can effectively result to a three percent savings in ambulatory health within 18 months, there was no huge impact on the in-patient costs when measured overall.
Julia Adler-Milstein, lead author of the study and assistant professor at the school of information from the University Of Michigan School Of Public Health, and her colleagues studied the date they got from the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, a project which began in 2006 adopting health information technology using ambulatory EHRs. They compared the in-patient costs that used EHRs to those which used traditional records.
The researchers took the average in-patient cost 15 months before the implementation of EHR and 18 months after its implementation. There were 48,000 patients in the EHR group and 130,000 in the non-EHR group. Common medical transactions of the in-patients were primary care and specialty consultation.
The EHR patients were able to save an average of $5.14 monthly within 18 months. The researchers then compared the overall health costs spent by both groups in which the difference of the costs was less than a cent.
"Our failure to find a statistically significant reduction in total cost may be explained by providers not using EHRs in more advanced ways that would improve patient health status, thereby avoiding hospitalizations and other high-cost episodes," the authors wrote. "The disruption caused by EHR adoption could have made it difficult for providers to learn how to use EHRs to monitor population health, better coordinate care, or engage in more sophisticated use."
The implementation of EHRs was seen by the healthy policymakers as way to cut overall spending significantly but the result of this study may give them enough reason to see which part of the plan didn’t work to achieve the goal.
This study was published on the July 16 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.
The CDC’s National Health Statistics Report has reported that 28 percent of the health care agencies have adopted EHR in 2007. It is expected to reach 80 percent this year
