Try to get a straight answer on how much an electronic health records system cost for a hospital (yes, I sometimes talk about hospital EMR on this blog too) and it’s nearly impossible. Of course, it’s the number one question on most hospital executives’ minds in light of stimulus funding, a simple price tag is still hard to find and you simply can’t find a straight answer.
Well, the people at MedSphere (memorable for their VW Bus pic at HIMSS) have put out a hospital EHR stimulus ROI calculator. The required fields are provider number and number of beds. As always I’m a bit skeptical about any sort of ROI calculator, but I like to have as much data as possible. So, here’s one other reference for those trying to calculate the EHR stimulus ROI.
Love the healthy skepticism, John! The Healthcare IT industry at large has certainly earned it over the years. FYI to date we have nearly four dozen hospitals that have run the calculator. The average ROI over 5 years is $2.5m net of the Medsphere Open Vista subscription for this sample set.
A little CYA never hurts. At least when you’re a blogger. Plus, I always think it’s good to get as much data as possible. The better the data the better the decision.
Thanks for the recommendation John. Its an interesting baseline and bravo to Medsphere for putting it out to the public, we’ll not see an Epic Systems, Cerner or Eclipsys doing this but I’d vote that they take a page off progressive and do a comparison of top venders prices vs ROI if that information is ever made public.