CBO Director Orszag says health IT holds promise, but no panacea for health care costs

Jun 24 2008

Health information technology could improve health care quality, but it is not the cure-all solution to reducing U.S. health care costs, Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag said at a forum on Friday, CQ HealthBeat reports. The forum was hosted by the Alliance for Health Reform and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Orszag said that while a recent RAND study concluded that broad adoption of health IT could lead to annual savings of about $80 billion, the findings were based on studies "demonstrating positive effects" of the technology and the study projects "potential" not "likely" savings. Orszag said that health IT is not going to "magically bend the health care cost curve." He added, "I'm not saying you shouldn't be excited about health IT. You need to calibrate your excitement in a context of needing other things as well."

Orszag said that "there are health IT savings that are possible on the small scale," but nationwide adoption of health IT would be needed to achieve maximum savings and efficiency. He also advocated the implementation of policy measures on a nationwide scale, saying that the real change will not occur unless the federal government imposes penalties on physicians who refuse to adopt the technology.

Sara Rosenbaum, a health policy researcher at George Washington University and a panelist at the forum, noted that a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "fully functional" electronic health record systems adopted by physicians improve quality of care but that the majority of physicians do not use such systems. Rosenbaum said, "Adoption (of EHRs) is not pain free, which probably helps explain why there are so many non-adopters," adding that the high cost of switching to EHRs and difficulty in finding a system that meets physicians' needs are significant barriers to adopting the technology (Cooley, CQ HealthBeat, 6/20).

A webcast of the forum is available online at kaisernetwork.org.

Letter Addresses Privacy Issue

There are a number of reasons why "patients and doctors may want to avoid online electronic medical records," Twila Brase, president of the Citizens' Council on Health Care, writes in a letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun. Brase writes that by "using access to online records, payers hope to exert more control on medical decisions," adding that physicians "who comply with government-issued and corporate-issued treatment directives, as recorded by digital treatment tracking systems, will earn more," and those "who do not comply will be financially penalized."

According to Brase, "With patient safety, medical ethics and health care access at stake, a patient's right to refuse online digital medical records and to limit outside access to private medical data is critical." She concludes, "There's more at stake here than patient privacy: No patient or doctor should be forced to cede authority over private medical decisions to self-interested outsiders" (Brase, Baltimore Sun, 6/21).