Providers should focus on health IT safety, CHIME speakers advise

Providers should plan to demonstrate patient-safety benefits attributable to their increasing use of healthcare technology, said experts at a panel at the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives fall meeting in San Antonio.

Tenet Healthcare Corp., for example, has been focusing on IT-linked benefits, said Liz Johnson, Tenet vice president of applied clinical informatics. Tenet expects health IT to deliver $60 million to $100 million in benefits per year, but gathering information to confirm what costs actually have been avoided because of technology is difficult, Johnson said.

Part of the challenge, said Ronni Solomon, the general counsel of not-for-profit safety group ECRI Institute, is settling on what safety problems were caused by health IT so they can be addressed and, hopefully, corrected. Her group has helped organize a number of providers, vendors and others to discuss common safety issues arising from health IT and how to address them.

The safety discussion comes as a safety center is on the way from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. But House Republicans have questioned whether current appropriations for the ONC allow for creation of such a center.

CHIME's vice president of public policy, Jeff Smith, said in an interview after the event that the ONC is confident it can use currently appropriated money to create the center.

An ONC spokesman said, in response to a question regarding the agency's authority and funding, that “the president's 2015 budget includes funding for such a center. We will be using existing authorities (and) leveraging those of other federal partners.”

Follow Darius Tahir on Twitter: @dariustahir