November 13, 2020: It’s been about a decade since the passing of the HITECH Act when we as a country decided to invest many billions of dollars into our health IT infrastructure. So it’s the perfect time to look back and see how things are going. Bob Rudin of the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, shares their research. The working paper is called “Optimizing Health IT to Improve Health System Performance.” They interviewed executives from 24 health systems around the country. We see all kinds of efficiencies in every industry, why isn’t it happening in healthcare? What’s going on? What’s the problem? Are we getting value from all the new technology? If not, why not? How can we do better? What about distribution? How do we get apps out to the masses? How do we get the clinicians to adopt them? And with so many mergers happening, is there a secret sauce?

Key Points:

• Looking at health IT in the context of health systems and how we're trying to use it to improve performance [00:05:25] 
• There's now industry consensus that it’s better for a health system to be on one electronic health record rather than on more. There’s so many efficiencies you gain from doing that. [00:11:25] 
• The 10 year foundation has been laid but it was 5 years ago when the 21st Century Cures was signed into law that we really saw the first seeds [00:34:05] 
• Can we all agree that evidence-based medicine makes the most sense? The answer to that is not always. [00:43:45] 
• "Optimizing health IT to improve health system performance"