ICU Management & Practice, ICU Volume 13 - Issue 4 - Winter 2013/2014

A recent article in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making by Ixchel Castellanos and colleagues looked at the financial implications of introducing a Patient Data Management System. This study was a retrospective observational and explorative analysis of cost and reimbursement data of a hospital ICU in Germany for three years before and three years after the system introduction. The authors believe that they are the first to present a ROI calculation for a PDMS based on the actual costs and revenues of an ICU. They note that they were surprised that there are few typical parameters, which may be used to compare different institutions, and hope that their approach may encourage institutions to publish comparable data. They found a considerable increase of costs and reimbursement over six years, which was largely unaffected by PDMS introduction and no net cost savings when comparing the considerable investment costs with the potential effect on revenue.They surmise that the introduction of a PDMS has probably minimal or no effect on reimbursement. They conclude, "In our case the observed increase in profit was too small to amortise the total investment for PDMS implementation. This may add some counterweight to the literature, where expectations for tools such as the PDMS can be quite unreasonable."

 

Reference

Castellanos I et al. (2013) Does introduction of a Patient Data Management System (PDMS) improve the financial situation of an intensive care unit? BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making,13: 107. Available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/13/107

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