The massive challenges facing healthcare reform may not appear to have much to do with the challenges facing the typical CIO, but in a post in Forbes, Dan Woods describes a very interesting analogy: In both environments, system-wide costs have been rising while the prices of particular services have been falling. As services are commoditized, their usage increases, resulting in greater benefits as well as greater overall spending. 

The problem for both IT and healthcare, as Woods sees it, is that current methods of accounting show only the increased spending, not the increased benefits. The answer, for CIOs and healthcare reformers, is to find better ways of quantifying the positive results of their spending. In IT, this can be done using a framework for mapping the costs of a transaction and its benefits, Woods maintains.

In light of Wood's analogy, it is particularly interesting to see the healthcare initiatives of some of the biggest players in enterprise IT. Over the last few months, we have seen a flurry of new software products and services related to electronic health records: Last month, Microsoft unveiled HealthVault Community Connect, which helps hospitals manage records processing and automates patient entry and discharge information; in February, IBM purchased Initiate Systems, whose applications enable hospitals and other providers to share patient data; and this week, AT&T announced improvements to its Healthcare Community Online, a cloud-based data exchange and collaboration portal. 

These are some of the same vendors whose products and services are constantly pumping up the IT department's bottom line. Since they will almost certainly play a similar role in healthcare reform, maybe they should find a way to help the customer--be it the average CIO or the healthcare administrator--better quantify the benefits of the ballooning expenses.

For more:
- read Dan Wood's post at Forbes
- see Microsoft press release on HealthVault
- see IBM press release on Initiate Systems

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