The potential for health information technology to control costs continues to be limited by the lack of needed payment reform by insurers, according to the senior federal health IT official.
Dr. Farzad Mostashari, national coordinator for health information technology, told the annual Washington gathering of the largest advocacy group for health insurers that more shared-savings and population health-based payment programs to reward providers need to be implemented.
“As long as we live in a fee-for-service world, it will be very hard—technology alone won't solve some of these practices and costs—not because people don't want to do the right thing, but because it is hard to ask the CFO to invest in something that's going to reduce their revenue,” Mostashari said.
Implementing more shared-savings programs—especially if they were standardized between insurers—would give hospitals and physicians more incentive to change their practices instead of losing money because they have eliminated unnecessary care.
Mostashari also pleaded with insurers to add more standardization to ease the paperwork burden on providers.
“And right now they are feeling overwhelmed; they don't know what the payment systems are going to be, and it feels like one more thing after one more thing,” he said. “Can we work together for once to take something off their plate?”
For instance, he hailed the example of 40% of insurance plans in Minnesota agreeing to replace phone-based prior-authorization requirements with an EHR feature that performed the same function in seconds.
“Ten seconds from 10 minutes and the docs were a lot happier,” Mostashari said. “And we can do that nationally.”
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