Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 14, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 24, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The economic value of data and analytics for healthcare providers: A hermeneutic systematic literature review
ABSTRACT
Background:
The benefits of data and analytics for healthcare providers is an increasingly investigated field in digital health literature. Electronic Health Records (EHR), for example, can improve quality of care. Emerging analytics tools based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) also show the potential to assist physicians in day-to-day workflows. Yet, healthcare providers also need information regarding the impact on their economics when deciding on a potential adoption of these tools.
Objective:
The aim of this paper is to examine the question whether data and analytics provide economic advantages or disadvantages for healthcare providers. The goal is to provide a comprehensive overview including a variety of technologies beyond the EHR. Ultimately, findings are intended to determine whether economic barriers for adoption by providers could exist.
Methods:
A systematic literature search of the PubMed and Google Scholar online databases was conducted, thereby following the hermeneutic methodology which encourages iterative search and interpretation cycles. After applying in- and exclusion criteria to 167 initially identified studies, 50 were included for qualitative synthesis and topic-based clustering.
Results:
The review identified 5 major technology categories, namely EHRs (30 papers), Computerized Clinical Decision Support (8), Advanced Health Data Analytics (5), Business Analytics (5) and Telemedicine (2). Overall, 62% (31/50) of the reviewed studies indicated a positive economic impact for providers either via direct cost or revenue effects or via indirect efficiency or productivity improvements. When differentiating between categories, however, an ambiguous picture emerged for the EHR, whereas adjacent technologies like Computerized Clinical Decision Support predominantly showed economic benefits.
Conclusions:
In general, data and analytics can provide economic benefits for healthcare providers. However, ambiguous results regarding EHRs can create an economic barrier for adoption by providers. This barrier can translate into a bottleneck to the identified positive economic effects of technologies further down the line which oftentimes rely on EHR data. Ultimately, more research on economic effects of technologies other than the EHR is needed to generate a more holistic and reliable evidence base.
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Copyright
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