Stephen B. Soumerai is a professor of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Medical School. Sumit R. Majumdar is an associate professor at the University of Alberta’s Department of Medicine. The following is an op-ed they wrote that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post:
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The assumption underlying the proposed investment in health IT is that more and better clinical information will improve care and save money. It is true that computerized records in some settings might improve care, such as by preventing duplicative prescriptions, medical errors caused by illegible handwriting and even inappropriate treatments. But the benefits of health IT have been greatly exaggerated. Large, randomized controlled studies — the “gold standard” of evidence — in this country and Britain have found that electronic records with computerized decision support did not result in a single improvement in any measure of quality of care for patients with chronic conditions including heart disease and asthma. While computerized systems seek to reduce the overapplication or misuse of care, they do little to prompt greater and more widespread health-care practices that are known to be effective. Health IT has not been proven to save money. Moreover, personal financial ties have been found between some researchers and the companies that produce these systems, and as far back as 2005 studies have shown that health IT developers are about three times more likely to report “success” than evaluators who had no part in system development.
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