Wednesday, May 26, 2004

The State of Mental Health Services in Massachusetts: The Impact of Inadequate Funding
NAMI report, in Adobe Acrobat format, available at the Open Minds web site - " After several years of cutbacks and service reductions, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is proposing to cut even more from its mental health system. The recently released House budget restores vital research funding and provides crucial funding for under-paid mental health workers, yet there is still a dire shortage of mental health services. Earlier this year there was a proposal to cut more than $5 million in 2005, cutting adult in-patient care and emergency services. This came on the heels of years of budget cuts, including $7.8 million in fiscal year 2002, more than $13.8 million in 2003, and another $12.7 million last year."  
  

Financial Incentives: Innovative Payment for Health Information Technology
A report, in Adobe Acrobat format, for the Health Strategies Consultancy, available at the Open Minds web site - " An increasing number of studies measure the value and cost effectiveness of CPOE, EHR, bar coding, electronic prescribing and other types of HIT. These analyses tend to focus on patient safety improvements, financial benefits from quality and efficiency improvements, and the development of a business case for HIT. In particular, these types of studies can play an important role in supporting the adoption of financial incentives programs; they emphasize the misalignment of costs and benefits among individual stakeholders adopting technology (e.g., purchasers, providers) and provide actuarial analyses and evidence for development of a business case and ROI for HIT. These studies tend to be site specific; therefore applicability of the analyses may be limited because they will not address each community’s unique and individual issues."  
  

How To Succeed In Health Information Technology
Health Affairs article - "The United States is poised to move the debate over electronic information systems for health care beyond the question of whether to computerize to how to computerize. Developers should heed the experiences of those who have already attempted similar efforts in vertically integrated environments. A key lesson is that the expertise and design perspectives of IT professionals should be supplemented with practical input from the caregivers and administrators who will actually use these systems. The paper by Douglas Bell and colleagues offers a ray of hope, as these authors have begun their process by asking the user community exactly what it needs."