Cost Savings Potential of Electronic Medical Records

Good news on the cost savings performance of Vista which is the VA's electronic medical record system:

A new study in the journal Health Affairs finds that while the system, "collectively called Vista, for Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture" was expensive, it has paid off, The Wall Street Journal reports. "'We conservatively estimate that the VA's investments in the four health IT systems studied yielded $3.09 billion in cumulative benefits net of investment costs by 2007,' say the authors, a team from Center for IT Leadership at Partners Healthcare in Charlestown, Mass. The results looks at measures such as reduced workloads, freed workspace and savings from items such as unneeded medical tests and avoided hospital admissions. The biggest VA outlay -- and its biggest savings generator -- was the Vista's Computerized Patient Record System, the home-grown system for electronic health records that was found by the study to cost $3.6 billion."

The study also found that the VA "had spent proportionally more on IT than the private sector but could claim better performance in such areas as cancer screening and better glucose measures for diabetics" (White, 4/6).

Vista is available for free off the VA website. It is also open sourced which means that users can update and improve it when needed. So why has such a proven, inexpensive system not been utilized by the private health care system? It is a very good question particularly since the use of numerous expensive private software solutions most likely will inhibit the ability of health care systems to share records when necessary.