Economics in EMR

Content:
In this week’s two classes, Dr. Johnson gave us two excellent lectures about the economic factors that influence the implementation and operation of health informatics system in health care practices. He introduce the basic economic terms involved in cost-benefits analysis on EMR system in hospital, such as the perspectives, measures of cost and benefits, the opportunity cost, the discount rate, and the analytical approaches commonly used. This is the first economics related class that I have ever officially taken in my life. But Dr. John’s humorous style and simplification of abstract problem to practical daily examples make me not feel so hard to understand the economic points involved in implementation of health informatics technology in health care field. The most important point I got from his class is that “who will get the benefits, who should pay”. I will talk about my understanding and the practical issues related to this point.

For this question, I first need to set the scope of the analysis from hospital perspective. From the hospital perspective, the hospitals get the most directive benefits, the money, from implementation of health informatics technologies. Such as many cost-benefits analysis of EMR systems in hospital illustrated, the hospital will get the increased money resulted from the helpfulness of EMR. Then the patients indirectly also get benefits from the increased quality of health service from hospitals after the implementation of EMR. Furthermore, the higher quality service received by patients would induce the patients more prefer to choose this hospital next time when he/she need, and thereby this hospital will earn more money compared to before implementation of EMR. Therefore, based on the above analysis, I think the hospitals are the main beneficiary from implementing EMR. So payment for the cost of EMR system should be paid by health care providers, and the monetary benefits they can earn is the direct incentives to thrust the implementation of EMR.

Posted by  Di Pan