Organizations Must Reengineer Processes to Achieve Health IT’s Promise for Better Patient Care

Health information technology (IT) is failing to deliver on its promise to reduce healthcare costs with quality and efficiency improvements in patient care, say researchers from RAND Corporation (Santa Monica, California), which, in 2005, predicted health IT could save at least $81 billion annually. In a reassessment of health IT’s promise, published in the January 2013 issue of Health Affairs, two RAND researchers who were not involved with the original study say that the failure to achieve savings and patient care improvements from health IT is due to the failure of healthcare providers to reengineer their processes to maximize health IT’s benefits.