How Can Health IT Lead to a More Sustainable Health Care System?

Across the country, health care providers are making significant investments to redesign care processes and strengthen their health information technology (health IT) capabilities with the goal of achieving better care, better health, and lower costs. For the American health care system as a whole, the simultaneous pursuit of all three of these aims is essential to sustaining any one of them. Over the years, economists and health IT experts have projected a wide range of cost savings from health IT implementation. These kinds of analyses are challenging because they require experts to predict how health IT will influence changes in provider and consumer behavior, and how those changes in behavior in turn influence quality and financial outcomes. Yet it is still important to understand how health IT can support the nation’s efforts to “bend the cost curve” and ultimately slow the growth of health care spending, while improving outcomes and the health of the population. Within this context, a single health care health IT-enabled intervention that achieves the goal of improving health care quality may be more likely to spread if that intervention has also demonstrated measurable net reductions in health care expenditures.