Study: VA gets high yield from HIT investment

The Department of Veterans Affairs has spent proportionally more than the private sector on health IT and has achieved higher levels of IT adoption and quality of care as a result.

Those were the key conclusions reached in a comparative study undertaken by researchers from the Center for Information Technology Leadership and published in the April issue of Health Affairs, a healthcare policy journal. CITL is part of the Boston-based, nonprofit Partners HealthCare System. The CITL researchers concluded that taxpayers have ponied up over $4 billion on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), and its predecessor, the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program, since 1977. CITL compared VA IT spending levels from 2001 to 2007 with that in the private sector and came up with a ratio of IT spending to total healthcare spending of 4.76 percent at the VA and 3.97 percent in the private sector figure.