HMS Prof Lands Contract To Study Health IT

A Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor and a colleague from George Washington University Medical Center won a contract last Thursday to study ways of measuring the spread of health information technology (IT).

The researchers, HMS’ Thier Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Policy David Blumenthal ’70 and Hirsh Professor of Health Law and Policy Sara Rosenbaum will use the award—which was granted by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—to lead a team of experts in assessing different standards of health IT measurement.

“[We are] trying to move those standards into technical language and measures,” Blumenthal said. “[We’re] try[ing] to translate standards into measurement tools.”

The contract comes on the heels of a number of multi-million dollar awards granted to private non-profit corporations from HHS to develop standards, regulations, and measurements for emergent health IT.

The term health IT broadly refers to the development and use of electronic medical records. But Rosenbaum said it is more complicated than the term suggests.

“[It’s] more than simply saying ‘I’m recording everything in the record,’” Rosenbaum said. She said it was also about making the record more accessible and useful.

Health IT implementation has been a government priority since President George W. Bush’s April 27, 2004 Executive Order (EO), which called for the spread of electronic health records to promote cheaper and more efficient health care. In response to the EO, HHS has launched a number of programs promoting health IT.

But efforts to assess the spread of health IT have been hamstrung by the lack of standard definitions or measures for the new technology.

According to Blumenthal, their research will provide future surveys of health IT implementation with comprehensive best practice guidelines, addressing part of the problem.

Unlike past research, this study will call on both doctors and hospital administrators to refine the ways of measuring the spread of health IT.

“A lot of surveys measure pieces of the picture in terms of [health IT] and its adoption,” Blumenthal said. “[But] there’s never been any collective effort to develop consistent measurement approaches.”

Blumenthal added that the study has a potential international impact, as the problem of measuring the spread of health IT is fairly universal.

The more general problem of standardization remains to be addressed. Rosenbaum said that standardization is an issue wherever new technologies are concerned.

According to the Center for Information Technology Leadership—a health IT research organization—the widespread implementation of health IT could yield annual U.S. savings of nearly $78 billion.