METHODS OF ASSESSING COST-EFFECTIVENESS

There have not been many rigorous studies of cost effectiveness of e-health measures in the literature. The most recent literature review of studies in this field concluded that there remained a "paucity of meaningful data on the cost-benefit calculation of actual IT implementation" (Goldzweig, Towfigh, Maglione & Shekelle, 2009, p. 292). The studies which this literature review collected, after a comprehensive selection process, can be broken into four different approaches.

One approach looks at the experience of a few large organizations that had implemented multifunctional, interoperable electronic health records (EHRs), computerized physician order entry (CPOE), decision-support systems, and other functions. However, these studies cannot be described as appropriate cost effectiveness or cost benefit analyses since they only evaluated the impacts in terms of clinical performance/quality improvement or potential benefit in terms of patient safety measures, but did not attempt to quantify the costs of these technologies or to then derive a net benefit calculation using some common measure (for instance, some imputed welfare gain in terms of dollars).