Earlier this month the California Health Care Foundation published Equipped for Efficiency: Improving Nursing Care Through Technology, and in so doing, misses the largest point. The piece provides valuable information in regards to opportunities for improving healthcare efficiency, but doesn’t address the bigger problem: How?
How can these or any technology aimed at making healthcare more efficient be funded? What are the criteria? It’s difficult to utilize financial tools like Internal Rate of Return, Net Present Value or even simple Return on Investment models, in large part because it doesn’t matter. That is, life will continue with or without these technologies and the standard mechanisms of competition are so greatly blunted by the fact that medicine continues to be driven by the preferences of physicians.
All the recommendations in this report are legitimate, but where is the business model and how is it validated. That is where the intellectual heavy lifting lies. We need to build the business case that is measureable, transferrable and trustworthy.
