Nancy Anthracite wrote:
You are so right. You might be able to stick a dollar amount on money saved
on maintaining and finding paper records, but how can you put a dollar amount
on having a machine double check your orders for drug interactions, always
having that chart at your fingertips, etc.
"Priceless" for an answer probably won't hack it.
Well..
No doubt evaluating it is tricky, but getting a ball park figure is
not impossible and is what will persuade.
In the case you mention:
dollar amount saved for automating health records
=
(paper costs saved)
+
(Time saved in seconds * salary/ per second of worker)
+
(mistreatment costs saved per patient)
where:
(mistreatment costs saved per patient)
=
(mistreatment costs per patient) * (pre-automation - post-automation
mistreatment rate per patient )
where
(mistreatment costs saved per patient)
=
money lost by patient + money lost by hospital in fixing problem + any
compensation for mental trauma
etc...
(ie needs further breaking down, but you get the general principle. If
in doubt, get a medical physicist down in radiology to help you with
thinking this thing through - physicists tend have a way of looking at
these kind of problems that engineers and programmers don't).
Christoph was trying to figure out how to quantify the benefits. Well,
show a boss the figures that come out with this kind of reasoning.
He will leap upon them, dress them up in a powerpoint presentation,
and call it a Cost-Benefit-Analysis and get on with persuading
management to do a switch to EHR.
IIRC, the VA had quantified the reduction in wrong drugs given pre and
post VISTA. So I am sure the information is out there.
regards
PJ
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