Give RAND Corp. researchers Arthur Kellermann and Spencer Jones a gold star for integrity for pointing out the predictions in a totemic 2005 RAND report haven't quite panned out yet.
Their latest analysis of the value of health IT, published in the January edition of Health Affairs, notes that the billions of dollars in annual savings from the adoption of health IT systems projected by RAND peer Richard Hillestad in 2005 haven't materialized.
The Hillestad study was often cited by EHR advocates, including a few federal legislators, as an economic argument for promotion of health IT.
What seems to be getting lost in some recent news reports and follow-up discussions about both RAND reports, however, is that while the predictions of Hillestad and his team “have not yet come to pass,” it is not because their cost-savings projections were flawed, according to Kellermann and Jones, but rather because of “sluggish adoption of health IT systems,” EHRs that are “neither interoperable nor easy to use,” and providers who fail to re-engineer their care process to best leverage the IT systems they have.
Some analysts have interpreted Kellermann and Jones' report as RAND crawfishing.
Hillestad, now retired, says he has been keeping up on the controversy and is standing firm.
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We probably won't know until late January the full-year numbers for 2012 on the EHR incentive payment program, but with three quarters of the year reporting, 2012 already is shaping up to be a banner year in health information technology.
Here's what I mean.
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