Obama Overstates Benefits Of EHRs, According To Opinion Piece

Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Also Included In: Public Health;  Pharmacy / Pharmacist;  Primary Care / General Practice
Article Date: 13 Mar 2009 - 4:00 PDT

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The "flagship proposal" presented by President Obama at last week's health care summit was the national adoption of electronic health records, but EHRs are "an overly simplistic and unsubstantiated part of the solution" to problems with the U.S. health care system, Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, staff members at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and faculty members of Harvard Medical School, write in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

Obama said EHRs would save an estimated $80 billion annually, prevent medical errors, reduce malpractice lawsuits and assist with both preventive care and chronic disease management, according to Groopman and Hartzband. However, they write, Obama based his proposal on a 2005 RAND study on EHRs, for which "there was no compelling evidence at the time to support [the study's] theoretical claims." According to the authors, "The cost savings from avoiding medication errors are relatively small, amounting at most to a few billion dollars yearly, as the RAND consultants admit." They write, "Other potential cost savings are far from certain." For example, "[t]he impact of medication errors on malpractice costs is likely to be minimal, since the vast majority of lawsuits arise not from technical mistakes like incorrect prescriptions but from diagnostic errors" and "[t]here is no evidence" that EHRs reduce those errors, according to Groopman and Hartzband.

They continue that much of the growth in health care costs is caused by the proliferation of costly new technology and treatments, as well as by administrative overhead related to insurance billing and payments, uninsured patients using emergency departments and end-of-life care. "The president and his health care team have yet to address these difficult and pressing issues," they write, adding, "Our culture adores technology, so it is not surprising that the electronic medical record has been touted as the first important step in curing the ills of our health care system." However, they conclude, the country instead needs Obama "to apply real scientific rigor to fix our health care system rather than rely on elegant exercises in wishful thinking" (Groopman/Hartzband, Wall Street Journal, 3/12).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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