Computers Haven't (and Won't) Save Health Care

A study at Harvard Medical School concludes that--surprise!--computers don't save money. And they don't improve the quality of care.

The study's lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, says that "computer systems are built for the accountants and managers and not built to help doctors, nurses and patients." This won't shock clinicians or anyone else who has seen these systems deployed. (See my earlier post on a related topic.) But it does run counter to conventional wisdom and the claims of some existing research on clinical information systems.

To evaluate the claims as well as previous research, Himmelstein and his co-authors looked at the data used to make the positive claims, as well as other, larger datasets. What they found is that there is no correlation between clinical information systems and providing high-quality or low-cost care.

Himmelstein again.

For 45 years or so, people have been claiming computers are going to save vast amounts of money and that the payoff was just around the corner.... So the first thing we need to do is stop claiming things there's no evidence for. It's based on vaporware and [hasn't been] shown to exist or shown to be true.