Survey attempts to collect ‘holy grail’ HIT, ROI data

The Scottsdale Institute has an expanded survey under way of healthcare industry executives aimed at better defining the often gauzy links between spending on health information technology and returns on that investment.

A pilot survey to that end was run two years ago with the aid of institute member Spectrum Health, a four-hospital system based in Grand Rapids, Mich., said Shelli Williamson, executive director of the Scottsdale Institute, a not-for-profit collaborative of healthcare organizations that serves as a forum for sharing best practices.

After the pilot, at several subsequent institute conferences, “the notion came up that we could expand a little bit and improve upon the data that would go into this,” Williamson said.

Over the past year, member organization chief information officers and chief financial officers provided additional feedback about the shortcomings of available data and the need for apples-to-apples, comparable information, she said. They have tried to come up with a survey that is at once capable of yielding the pertinent data and yet doable by busy executives.

“We continue to hear from the CIOs and the CFOs that this is a black hole,” Williamson said. “They both have, obviously, a need to know and a strong interest in these IT cost components."

“The holy grail would be to see who is getting the value from equal amounts of expenditures,” Williamson said. “The ultimate thing would be to get to the notion of value received, what applications are being supported, how many physicians are on (computerized physician order-entry systems), and what am I getting for the money."

Williamson said Kent Gale of Orem, Utah-based KLAS Enterprises, an IT market research firm, also provided expertise in developing the updated survey.

The institute welcomes participation in the survey from nonmember organizations, Williamson said. There is no charge to participate.

An overview of the survey, plus copies of the survey form and support services documents, as well as instructions are available at the Scottsdale Institute Web site.

“We’d like to get as much data as we can by the end of April and have a preliminary review of the results after that,” Williamson said.