In light of health care reform, many hospital executives are starting to implement new health care IT solutions to cut costs and become more efficient, according to a recent survey conducted by Investment Technology Group (ITG) Market Research. The survey included 100 executives from 100 different hospitals and health systems in the U.S.

It found that more than half of the executives believe that U.S. business conditions are improving and 35 percent expect conditions to improve this year. However, they are waiting for that economic progress to trickle into their hospitals.

What they're most worried about is declining reimbursement — over 60 percent of the respondents reported that it's one of their main concerns. Additionally, they're not so sure that the higher volume of insured patients will offset the cuts.

This strain has caused a third of the executives to cut their staff in the first half of this year and more than 40 percent expect that they will not spend as much on large capital equipment over the next year.

Big data is now front and center as hospitals and health systems try to make decisions in this new value-based climate. "The bigger [the hospitals] are, the more critical it is to be able to accurately predict what portion of their patients is going to require expensive or less expensive treatment because they need to be able to manage their risk and plan accordingly," Graeme Christianson, director of health care market research at ITG, told DOTmed News.

Electronic medical records were the first step but now that most hospitals have implemented them, they're looking for the next step.

Population Health Management solutions are one of the next steps. "With the push towards accountable care, these hospitals are basically responsible for covering and taking care of a population of people and to do that they need to be able to assess which patients are more at risk for requiring high cost treatment," said Christianson.

Business intelligence solutions are also on hospitals' radars. A lot of the initial work with moving towards EMRs was all about the clinical focus and making sure the physicians had easy access to patient data but now there's a realization that the administrators and C-level executives who are busy planning strategies for the hospitals need that information as well, said Christianson.

Hospitals are also participating in group purchasing organizations and accountable care organization initiatives to improve their cost efficiencies.

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