Healthcare Observers Disagree on Cost-effectiveness of Electronic Health Record Systems
Medical laboratory professionals will be surprised to learn that some experts claim American healthcare will not see a return on investment from use of EHR systems
It is the popular wisdom today that universal adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems will lead to significant improvements in patient outcomes, while also delivering substantial cost savings to the American health system.
However, this trend also requires clinical laboratories to spend substantial amounts of money to provide electronic interfaces between their laboratory information systems (LIS) and EHR systems of their client physicians.
Until recently, very little criticism of these federal EHR subsidies has appeared in the media. However, some experts now assert that tens of billions of dollars hospitals and physicians are spending to implement EHRs and integrate their information systems will never be recouped by downstream savings. (more…)
