The Scottsdale Institute has an expanded survey under way of healthcare industry executives aimed at better defining the often gauzy links between spending on health information technology and returns on that investment.
A pilot survey to that end was run two years ago with the aid of institute member Spectrum Health, a four-hospital system based in Grand Rapids, Mich., said Shelli Williamson, executive director of the Scottsdale Institute, a not-for-profit collaborative of healthcare organizations that serves as a forum for sharing best practices.
After the pilot, at several subsequent institute conferences, “the notion came up that we could expand a little bit and improve upon the data that would go into this,” Williamson said.
Over the past year, member organization chief information officers and chief financial officers provided additional feedback about the shortcomings of available data and the need for apples-to-apples, comparable information, she said. They have tried to come up with a survey that is at once capable of yielding the pertinent data and yet doable by busy executives.
“We continue to hear from the CIOs and the CFOs that this is a black hole,” Williamson said. “They both have, obviously, a need to know and a strong interest in these IT cost components.
“The holy grail would be to see who is getting the value from equal amounts of expenditures,” Williamson said. “The ultimate thing would be to get to the notion of value received, what applications are being supported, how many physicians are on (computerized physician order-entry systems), and what am I getting for the money."
