Socio-economic Impacts of Health Care Informatics

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Kenneth C. Hoffman, PhD, Center for Enterprise Modernization, The MITRE Corporation, 7515 Colshire Drive, McLean, VA 22102, Pamela L. Thornton, PhD, The MITRE Corporation, 7515 Colshire Drive, McLean, VA 22102, 703-983-7222, pthornton@mitre.org, and Carolyn A. Padovano, PhD, Healthcare Mission Area, Center for Enterprise Modernization, 7515 Colshire Drive, McLean, VA 22102.

Health informatics is a dynamic area of research and policy analysis. Estimates of the impact of informatics, including Electronic Health Records and health information networks, range from savings of $100 to $600 billion per year in the next decade in a health sector that accounts for 15% of the US GDP, with further significant growth projected.

The health care sector is a Multi-Agent Enterprise involving public and private sectors and citizens to be served. Enterprise Architecture studies are underway to define productive roles for information technology in managing costs and improving health outcomes. Major benefits of informatics flow from the information-intensive interactions involving patient history, cost, diagnostics, treatments, and follow-up. Architectures that describe these flows within the complex enterprise must be developed in a comprehensive and integrated way to capture the major benefits of emerging informatics technologies.

Methods have been developed in a MITRE research program that describe the socio-economic interactions of informatics at multiple scales involving the patient, providers, health enterprises, communities, and the health sector of the US economy. This work addresses the complex interactions across the health care “network”, and describes an Integrated Technology and Policy Analysis Framework for the assessment of health technologies and public policies.

The methods include systems engineering models to analyze the role of informatics in health services and administration as recommended in a recent National Academy of Sciences study. These can be coupled with economic and inter-industry models for multiple scale analyses.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of the session, the participant (learner) in this session will be able to

1. Articulate a broad socio-economic systems perspective on the role of informatics in communities and the US health care system
2. Illustrate assessment methods for new network-centric enabling technologies such as the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags.
3. Contribute to constructive discussions of the complex interactions among enterprises, technology, and the economy to provide public services.
4. Understand the concept of Multi-Agency Enterprise Architectures as a way to describe health care operations and the organizations, business processes, and information technology resources that support health care operations.
5. List specific modeling approaches that can be applied to elements of the healthcare architecture to analyze performance at local, regional, and national levels.
6. Inform managers and analysts of the strengths and weaknesses of specific modeling approaches for business process design, resource planning, cost analysis, technology assessment, and policy analysis.

Keywords: Economic Analysis, Policy/Policy Development

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered

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The 134th Annual Meeting & Exposition (November 4-8, 2006) of APHA