Hospitals that have implemented value-based payment models are more likely to adopt technologies for population health, care coordination, data management and analytics, according to Deloitte's "Beyond the EHR" report.
For the report, researchers from professional services firm Deloitte analyzed data from 4,500 U.S. hospitals between 2012 and 2016. The analysis centered on two key questions:
1. "Were hospitals that receive a higher share of revenue from quality and value contracts more likely to adopt technology that supports new required capabilities?"
2. "Which technologies were hospitals with quality and value incentives more likely to adopt?"
The study produced two key findings:
1. Hospitals with incentives — defined in the study as "those that receive some fraction of their total revenue from … quality and value contracts such as bundled payments and global risk capitation" — were more likely to adopt population health management, data management and reporting technologies than hospitals without incentives.
2. Overall, hospitals with incentives were not significantly more likely to adopt patient and provider engagement technologies. However, hospitals with incentives were more likely to have adopted customer relationship management technologies.
"As this data shows, most health systems' technology adoption strategies are focused on organizing clinical data and information and adopting EHR systems and analytics capabilities to interpret the data," the report states.
"These technologies will likely continue to be critical. But, our analyses also show that many health systems — even ones that are farther along the road to new payment arrangements — may still lack critical technologies. Health systems should go beyond the EHR to focus on patient and provider engagement technologies (such as virtual care) and core operational and financial applications."
Click here to access the complete report.