Its not just about the money. Its about increased quality of healthcare. I think one of the important things to note is that the true benefits of healthcare r

Its not just about the money. Its about increased quality of healthcare. I think one of the important things to note is that the true benefits of healthcare reform are going to come with IT in the form of payment/reimbursement reform legislation and a restructuring of Health Insurance. As this article also notes, greater public benefit of IT comes from the data exchange pieces which are being put in place, big news this week with Kaiser sharing data with the VHA, I expect this to be a trend that snowballs more information into the NHIN. Other pieces of Healthcare IT that will benefit outcomes and burden on the system that this article doesn’t mention is Telemedicine for greater collaboration around providers, that is a sample among other emerging technologies that it will take government funding to really skyrocket. Taking a massive IT project inside the four walls of a Hospital can be tricky since you have to account for some soft metrics like time saved, reduced LOS’s, and other non direct financial rewards. The other piece that does not have widespread adoption is the analytics piece, mining the data and being able to use for process and efficiency improvement is HUGE, doubt that was taken into account either.