STC Blog
Healthcare Savings Available through Cost SharingTodd Watkins – STC Managing Partner/CAO
A national vision and framework for effective Health Information Exchange (HIE) between and among the various stakeholders is in place to help guide individual state and regional initiatives. By enabling the exchange of healthcare information, important patient and aggregate data can be analyzed to head off disease, provide higher quality of care to more individuals, combat fraud, and lower cost.
Much has been written and accomplished around this national vision. Standards around healthcare and technology are now available for healthcare organizations to use as their guidepost for making Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) investments. State designated entities entrusted with the more than two billion dollars pumped into the HIE and HIT marketplaces are examining the myriad of solutions available to determine those that provide the best opportunity for achieving the desired outcomes. Each jurisdiction is allowed to make its own decision as long as the standards are followed.
What seems to be absent from the process is the role re-usable technology can play to allow multiple jurisdictions to share costs of common features. A good example is what occurred recently around H1N1. Many states were faced with data collection and reporting requirements in order for the federal government to be able to accurately monitor the disease’s behavior and to make decisions to combat this pandemic. Money was made available to most state health departments to enhance their systems to accommodate the unique characteristics of this new and deadly strain of influenza. While each state worked tirelessly to quickly respond to the same disease with the same reporting requirements to the same federal group – most did so in a vacuum and independently of each other. There were however some states already using common systems with a re-useable infrastructure and thus were able to share costs of making the changes demanded by the H1N1 pandemic.
H1N1 was a single event that threatened our public’s health and well-being. HIE / HIT has a much broader vision with much higher stakes and a much higher price tag. The successful implementation of the nation’s vision for HIE / HIT will not only accomplish the goals of improving quality of care, reducing fraud, and lowering the overall cost of our healthcare delivery system, but it should also better prepare us to more rapidly respond to individual public health events like H1N1.
Because of this, looking beyond an individual jurisdiction’s scope is a key component to ensure that the vast amounts of money being allocated to HIE / HIT are being optimized. This can be accomplished by encouraging all solution providers to create releases of their systems to not only adhere to the healthcare and technology standards, but to deliver the technology in a way that promotes cost sharing within and among various jurisdictions. Otherwise we are at risk of spending money unnecessarily on an initiative designed largely to save money.
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