A disturbing trend is emerging across America. Just as Medical Centers are starting to fully move into the electronic realms, big budget cuts are looming. 37 states are facing budget shorfalls in 2009. Many of these states are looking at cutting services and costs to help balance their budgets.
How does this affect Health Information Technology? Quite simply, health care is damn expensive. Everyone knows that. Health sectors, primarily hospitals and clinics will take the brunt of cuts. When those medical centers take cuts, they need to re-balance their own budgets. One of the first places that phsyicians and CEOs will look will be right at HIT.
HIT is often viewed as a “black hole” for money. Lots and lots of money goes in, but we rarely generate any of our own. We offer huge improvements for the organization, but we often don’t look very strong on the balance sheets. The sad part is, even when an organization really sees HIT as critical and central to the mission of patient care, it is very very difficult to look at pruning down a clinical area vs. a support area. It is a rare administrator that would decide to let a nurse go over delaying a new application upgrade.
The real downer is that as IT leadership we should expect to be one of the first organizations to be cut during hard times. We are usually the most expensive support department, and in reality, the mission of your medical organization is to provide patient care. The needs of the patient must come first. So how do you keep a “Patient first, Technology first” attitude when your budget is being slashed in favor of another area? You will need to focus on your process improvement benefits. Streamline what applications you already have deployed. Make clinical workflows faster and more effecient. In the process of streamlining your organization, you just may find some short ROI projects that can get you back a few of those dollars that were cut.
