"The importance of this finding is that if hospitals can demonstrate an ability to improve quality without increasing costs per bed, it may be more-than-sufficient justification for making IT investments," said Nick Beard MD, director, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP and principal author of the paper. "By using the economic model and IT Capital Index, PwC can gain an even deeper understanding of the relationship between IT and quality of care using other more relevant measures of clinical quality and to eventually look at hospital specific issues."

PwC Publishes Report on HIT and Hospital Productivity


A summary of "The Economics of IT & Hospital Performance" and additional information about methodology can be found at www.pwc.com/healthcareIT.

The report is the result of a research program conducted by PwC's Technology Center in conjunction with Professor Lorin Hitt, of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business, who is a leading researcher in the field of economics, IT and business productivity. The study involved three types of data: hospital services and facilities utilization data, healthcare IT investment data, and hospital cost data. Data sources included the Solucient ProviderView database and the American Hospital Association's Annual Survey Database, Healthcare IT adoption data was drawn from the HIMSS Analytics database (derived from the Dorenfest IHDS+ Database), which contains annual hospital-level information on healthcare IT adoption for US hospitals.


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