Gone are the government grants, capital pass-throughs and Hill-Burton dollars that once paid for costly technology investments. Today, funding for a clinical information system (CIS) must come from a healthcare provider's own bottom line.
In past years, providers often conducted elaborate return on investment (ROI) analyses to justify a CIS multimillion dollar cost. However, under capitated payment, hospitals no longer have the time or money to conduct protracted "time and motion" studies.
Investing in an integrated CIS is no longer an option, but a mandatory minimum requirement for healthcare delivery networks to achieve economies of scale. Managed care reforms demand that providers eliminate the omnipresent duplication of effort uncovered by ROI studies. Providers must demonstrate low cost and high quality clinical outcomes when competing for fixed fee HMO and third-party payer contracts. Payers like USHealthcare, Aetna and Cigna are building sophisticated clinical information systems to identify the most cost-effective course of treatment, and they are inviting member physicians to use their client/server CIS products at the point of care.
Using proven technologies from other industries can save the healthcare industry millions of dollars in malpractice claims and productivity gains. Among those technologies are cellular telephone communications, radio frequency transmission, voice recognition, robotics, handheld personal digital assistants (PDA) and bar coding.Gone are the government grants, capital pass-throughs and Hill-Burton dollars that once paid for costly technology investments. Today, funding for a clinical information system (CIS) must come from a healthcare provider's own bottom line.
In past years, providers often conducted elaborate return on investment (ROI) analyses to justify a CIS multimillion dollar cost. However, under capitated payment, hospitals no longer have the time or money to conduct protracted "time and motion" studies.
Investing in an integrated CIS is no longer an option, but a mandatory minimum requirement for healthcare delivery networks to achieve economies of scale. Managed care reforms demand that providers eliminate the omnipresent duplication of effort uncovered by ROI studies. Providers must demonstrate low cost and high quality clinical outcomes when competing for fixed fee HMO and third-party payer contracts. Payers like USHealthcare, Aetna and Cigna are building sophisticated clinical information systems to identify the most cost-effective course of treatment, and they are inviting member physicians to use their client/server CIS products at the point of care.
Using proven technologies from other industries can save the healthcare industry millions of dollars in malpractice claims and productivity gains. Among those technologies are cellular telephone communications, radio frequency transmission, voice recognition, robotics, handheld personal digital assistants (PDA) and bar coding.
