Deloitte and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) recently conducted a study and found that for providers, life sciences companies, and payers there is clear correlation between return on investment (ROI) from clinical IT systems and high organizational support from health informatics. The organizations where respondents didn’t buy into the idea that health IT leads to significant ROI didn’t have as strong organizational support, alignment, and executive sponsorship as those that did.
“Resource constraints are a challenge in the medical informatics community: getting internal support for projects and staffing is a major issue,” the authors of the report wrote. Budgets were an issue, according to respondents, with a significant number of providers and payers saying they were uncertain where the health IT funding source would come from.
Across the board, there were concerns about personnel and access to “clean, comprehensive data.” However, the report says, the majority of respondents agree there is value in externally sourced clinical data, from an ROI perspective. The most valuable data, according to respondents, were prescription and claims data, while personal health records (PHRs) and group purchasing organization (GPOs) data was perceived as the least valuable. There was also, from a provider and life sciences perspective, value in patient registry/disease registry data.
