The use of electronic health records helped reduce short-term ambulatory health care costs but did not reduce overall inpatient costs, according to a study published Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, MedPage Today reports.
Study Details
For the study, researchers examined health care providers participating in the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, an initiative that aims to help communities widely adopt ambulatory EHRs (Pittman, MedPage Today, 7/15).
The researchers compared health insurance data claims from January 2005 through June 2009 for patient care in three Massachusetts communities that adopted EHRs with six communities that did not (Tran, “Capsules,” Kaiser Health News, 7/15).
There were a total of 48,000 patients in the communities that adopted EHRs and 130,000 in the control-group communities.
Researchers calculated the monthly costs of commercial payers from 15 months before EHR implementation and 18 months after implementation.
Study Findings
The study found that providers with EHRs saved an average of $5.14 per member each month over the 18 months following implementation, for a total of 3.4% in overall savings. Ambulatory costs accounted for about $4.69 of that amount.
The researchers found that health care costs increased for both the EHR and control groups. The EHR groups’ spending increased by an average of .78 absolute percentage points and the control groups’ spending increased by 1.09 absolute percentage points (MedPage Today, 7/15).
The study determined that there were significant savings in outpatient radiology costs. However, it found no significant savings in:
- Inpatient care costs;
- Outpatient pharmacy care costs;
- Laboratory care costs; or
- Total cost of care (“Capsules,” Kaiser Health News, 7/15).
Comments
The researchers determined that the “study offers robust evidence on the likely short-term effect of the federal policy effort to promote meaningful use of EHRs” (Durben Hirsch, FierceEMR, 7/16).
Lead author Julia Adler-Milstein of the University of Michigan and fellow study authors wrote that the “failure to find a statistically significant reduction in total cost may be explained by providers not using EHRs in more advanced ways that would improve patient health status, thereby avoiding hospitalizations and other high-cost episodes” (MedPage Today, 7/15). Source
