07 Oct Healthcare Wants More ROI From Health IT. Here’s How to Prove Value Before You Scale.

Top Takeaways

• Healthcare executives are placing greater emphasis on measurable returns from health IT and AI investments.
• Pilots, proofs of concept and initial workflows can help organizations demonstrate value before committing to larger implementations.
• Understanding the quality and readiness of healthcare data can help organizations identify risks that could limit the return on technology investments.
• Automation and AI can create ROI by reducing the effort required to prepare and deliver trusted data.
• New partnership and revenue sharing models can also help care organizations create additional value from their existing data infrastructure.

Healthcare organizations continue to invest heavily in technology, but expectations around those investments are changing. Today’s leaders increasingly want to know what they are getting in return and how quickly they can demonstrate it.

Nearly 95 percent of providers and payers consider health IT a top strategic priority, according to Healthcare Dive, but executives are placing greater emphasis on solutions that can deliver measurable results. For AI investments in particular, some organizations are targeting returns of three to four times their initial investment.

That puts greater pressure on healthcare organizations and their technology partners to demonstrate value earlier. Rather than committing significant resources and waiting for a large-scale implementation to determine whether an investment works, organizations can take a more deliberate approach by identifying specific opportunities, establishing measurable goals and proving value before they scale.

Healthcare IT Is Facing a Higher ROI Bar

The pressure to demonstrate ROI comes as healthcare organizations continue investing in AI, interoperability, analytics, digital quality measurement and other technologies intended to improve operations and care.

However, the technology itself is only part of the investment. Organizations also devote significant time and resources to integrating systems, preparing data, developing workflows, training staff and maintaining the infrastructure needed to support new capabilities.

That makes it increasingly important to define what success should look like before implementation begins. Depending on the use case, ROI could come from reducing manual work, accelerating a process, improving data quality, supporting better decisions, generating new revenue or allowing staff to focus their time on higher value activities.

Establishing those goals early also creates a clearer way to determine whether an investment is delivering the expected results.

Start Small, Prove the Value, Then Scale

One way to reduce the risk of a large technology investment is to begin with a focused problem and demonstrate what the technology can accomplish.

Pilots and proofs-of-concept can give healthcare organizations an opportunity to test a solution against a real operational need while establishing measurable goals from the beginning. An initial workflow might focus on improving a specific data exchange process, reducing manual data preparation, supporting a quality measure or making information available for a particular population health initiative.

The results can then inform the larger investment. Organizations gain a better understanding of what works, what needs to change and where additional resources will deliver the greatest value.

This approach can also help technology partners demonstrate their role in the outcome. At IMAT Solutions, we see an opportunity to work with healthcare organizations on initial workflows and proofs of concept that establish value early and create a foundation for broader adoption.

Know Whether Your Data Can Support the Investment

The return on a technology investment can also depend heavily on the data behind it. AI, analytics, quality measurement and other advanced capabilities require data that can be reliably integrated, normalized and used across systems.

Gaps in completeness, accuracy or consistency can introduce additional work, slow implementation and make it more difficult to achieve the expected results. Understanding those issues before making a larger investment can help organizations establish a more realistic starting point.

The IMAT Health Data Quality Assessment provides a documented baseline across five areas including data integration, normalization, completeness, accuracy and AI readiness. The assessment identifies key findings and risk areas, highlights targeted opportunities for improvement and provides a practical roadmap organizations can use to strengthen their data foundation.

For organizations considering significant investments in AI, analytics or other data driven initiatives, that visibility can help identify potential barriers to ROI before they become expensive problems.

Reduce the Work Between Data and Value

There is also an opportunity to generate ROI by reducing the amount of effort required to prepare and deliver healthcare data.

For example, IMAT Trailblazer is a new initiative being developed to help HIEs automate more of the data journey while exploring new opportunities to create value from high quality, trusted data. By leveraging AI and automation, Trailblazer is intended to reduce the effort required to prepare and deliver data, helping organizations operate more efficiently and get usable information where it needs to go faster.

For HIEs, the opportunity extends beyond efficiency. As they look for sustainable ways to expand their services, high-quality data can support new offerings for health plans and other healthcare organizations.

IMAT is also exploring partnership approaches that can align incentives around these opportunities, including revenue sharing models that allow organizations to participate in the value created from new data services.

Together, greater automation and new partnership models provide another way to think about ROI. The return can come from lowering the resources required to perform existing work while creating additional opportunities to generate value from the data infrastructure an organization has already built.

A More Practical Approach to Health IT ROI

Healthcare organizations will continue investing in AI and other technologies, but greater scrutiny around ROI could ultimately lead to better decisions about where and how those investments are made.

Starting with a defined use case can help organizations prove value before scaling. Assessing the underlying data can reveal issues that could limit results. Automation can reduce the work required to move from raw data to usable information, while new partnership models can create opportunities to generate additional value.

The common thread is demonstrating value earlier and building from measurable results.

For healthcare organizations facing increasing pressure to make every technology investment count, that approach can provide a clearer path from innovation to ROI.

Ready to Get More Value from Your Healthcare Data?

IMAT Solutions can help organizations evaluate their data foundation, identify high value use cases and explore approaches for demonstrating ROI before scaling larger technology investments.

Learn how the IMAT Health Data Quality Assessment, IMAT Intelligence and emerging initiatives such as IMAT Trailblazer can help your organization turn trusted healthcare data into greater efficiency, measurable results and new opportunities for value. Contact us to get started.

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