Choosing the right amount of healthcare information technologies investments
Received 28 September 2009; received in revised form 31 December 2009; accepted 4 January 2010. published online 01 February 2010.
Abstract
Objectives
Choosing and justifying the right amount of investment in healthcare information technologies (HITECH or HIT) in hospitals is an ever increasing challenge. Our objectives are to assess the financial impact of HIT on hospital outcome, and propose decision-helping tools that could be used to rationalize the distribution of hospital finances.
Design
We used a production function and microeconomic tools on data of 21 Paris university hospitals recorded from 1998 to 2006 to compute the elasticity coefficients of HIT versus non-HIT capital and labor as regards to hospital financial outcome and optimize the distribution of investments according to the productivity associated with each input.
Results
HIT inputs and non-HIT inputs both have a positive and significant impact on hospital production (elasticity coefficients respectively of 0.106 and 0.893; R2 of 0.92). We forecast 2006 results from the 1998 to 2005 dataset with an accuracy of +0.61%. With the model used, the best proportion of HIT investments was estimated to be 10.6% of total input and this was predicted to lead to a total saving of 388 million Euros for the 2006 dataset.
Conclusion
Considering HIT investment from the point of view of a global portfolio and applying econometric and microeconomic tools allow the required confidence level to be attained for choosing the right amount of HIT investments. It could also allow hospitals using these tools to make substantial savings, and help them forecast their choices for the following year for better HITECH governance in the current stimulation context.
Corresponding author at: University Hospitals of Geneva, Service of Medical Informatics, 24, rue Micheli-Du-Crest, CH-1211 Genève 14, Switzerland. Tel.: +41 0 22 30 55 878.
1 Address: Université Paris Descartes & HEGP, Laboratoire SPIM, 15 rue de l’école de Médecine, 75006 Paris, France.
ABSTRACT