Healthcare IT Update

What will we get for our $19 billion HIT investment?

Do a google news search for ‘HIT’ or ‘EHR’ and without fail you’ll get at least a couple of articles that gush over health information technology’s potential to improve health care quality, but a new study from Harvard says HIT hasn’t yet proved itself be the easy cure-all for what ails us.

An Internet search today, for example, might yield articles lauding EHR’s potential to prevent 25 percent of hip fractures or battle H1N1 in emergency departments. But if you look closely at these articles, you see that such studies are often funded — and later publicized — by HIT companies that have lots to gain from nationwide EHR adoption.

Also, such studies tend to focus on health care institutions that have state-of-the-art EHR systems…