HIT Necessities For Struggling Hospitals

Hospital CFOs are again reporting that their budgets are thin and that they are facing such a financial drain that they are unable to afford much needed new IT solutions like revenue cycle management software, and that their organization’s financial problems likely will last until at least 2016.

According to a new study published by Black Book Rankings, expenses from investments in electronic health records, health information exchanges and patient portals are currently occupying the majority of hospital’s budgets. In fact, 94 percent of the 2,300 hospital CFOs, CIOs and business office managers surveyed said that implementations of IT systems, particularly EHRs, are impacting their organization’s financial positions and are keeping them from making new, much-needed IT investments.

Strapped hospitals are in need of new solutions to help improve their revenue streams and to dig themselves from near financial ruin because other IT priorities, like meaningful use, continue to take precedence. CFOs at fiscally healthy hospitals, though, say that they are moving ahead with new solutions, like implementing RCM, as they are preparing for the switch to new payment risk models. Ninety-one percent of these individuals said their organizations are fully committed to next generation revenue cycle management solutions and that they are currently in the middle of implementations or plan to outsource or purchase the new software sometime in 2015...