Imagine the situation now where our IT shops are going to be pummelled for work, asked to cut costs, keep-up with the run-of-the-mill regulatories, and then waste a ton of money on coordinating our vendors through the 5010s and ICD-10. Another potential waste of money if we (our country) don’t actually have a real ROI business case behind this. The insurers will need to re-write their rules and recoup their investment so it will roll downhill to the providers in more complex billing, denial, and follow-up schemas and more processing power and storage.

In the mean time, people with their head in the right place are going to ask for throughput, patient safety, and quality of care enabling technologies. The financial times are going to force a ‘show me the real money’ business case and it may not be there. When it may be there, it’ll likely only be funded for a small, not enterprise, deployment. These piecemeal investments actually create more internal “haves and have-nots.” They also raise the cost of support or decreasing the service IT can provide. It is one more system to support with the same resources.

As Deep Throat said to Woodward and Bernstein, follow the money trail. Hospital providers get paid on a FFS, piecemeal basis and their IT systems have largely been designed to support this process on both the clinical and administrative sides.

The Bush administration’s initiative to stop paying for medical mistakes was earth-shattering, if only because it was not until after 2005 (40 years of Medicare) that someone did it.

Who’s scale should we use???
After reading the report..I’d go w IOM. There wasn’t much in the report I disagree with based on my working decades in HIT.