CITL Finds $44 Billion in Healthcare Savings
The Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL) is a nonprofit chartered by Partners Healthcare of Boston to help the healthcare community make more informed decisions about IT.
The Analytica showed that computerized order entry in US health clinics increases quality of care and significantly reduces costs.
The Challenge
The US healthcare system faces enormous cost and quality challenges. Insurance premiums have been rising over 10% per year.
Patients, healthcare providers, and payers worry about errors, including more than 3 million annual avoidable mistakes in prescribing medications for outpatients that lead to adverse and sometimes life-threatening reactions.
Computerized provider order-entry (CPOE) systems, which doctors use to enter drug orders, can check for dangerous drug interactions and a patient sensitivities. Such systems have been shown reduce errors by more than 50% in hospitals.
However, outpatient healthcare providers have been slow to adopt such systems, because their effectiveness and cost savings have not been clear.
Why Analytica?
“We found Analytica’s influence diagrams were the most natural tool to express our ideas about model structure. We also liked the way we could use probability distributions to be explicit about uncertainties. It can flexibly display simple point estimates or entire probability density plots, according to the interest of the user.”
– Eric Pan, MD, CITL.
The Solution
CITL developed an Analytica model to estimate the effectiveness, costs, and savings of CPOE systems for outpatient care.
Their model shows that US-wide adoption of advanced CPOE could avoid over 2 million adverse reactions to medications annually, an alarming 130,000 of which are life-threatening.
They also project net savings of approximately $44 billion per year — based on avoiding nearly 1.3 million outpatient visits and 190,000 hospital admissions, as well as more cost-effective medication, radiology, and lab ordering.
CITL distributes the model online so that individual clinics can estimate their own costs and savings of deploying CPOE.
For More
Contact CITL for a summary or to order the Analytica model and full report: The Value of Computerized Order Entry in Ambulatory Settings.