In response to the two Harvard studies declaring that electronic health records do not save hospitals money, I'm going to highlight healthcare systems that are indeed saving money through the use of EHRs or EMRs.

Denver Health and Hospital Authority may be a safety-net facility, but the Colorado healthcare system has spent a whopping $350 million plus on health IT over the last 12 years. When you invest that much money over more than a decade, you're a believer in technology. But you don't throw that kind of money around unless you reap a tremendous amount of ROI. And Denver Health, which is expected to spend nearly $360 million in services in 2009 alone as the state's largest provider for the uninsured and Medicaid patients, has seen administrative efficiencies and improved quality of care. Denver Health and Hospital Authority is planning on adding more applications to make its systems and processes even more efficient, which will create cost savings and deliver higher quality of care for its patients.

This year, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) awarded the 2009 Public Health Davies Award of Excellence to Denver Public Health, a division within Denver Health and Hospital Authority. The award validated the healthcare system's use of health IT, particularly its EHR.

Gregg Veltri, Denver Health and Hospital Authority's CIO, summed it up nicely and succinctly: "Healthcare delivery is all about technology - we're gathering every bit of information that we can, about everything that we do in the clinical perspective, and it is all going in a data warehouse, because if you can measure it, you can improve it or fix it." You can't measure how well you're doing with paper records, or at the very least you can't measure how well you're doing without a lot of man power. Denver Health and Hospital Authority gets it: Use data innovatively to "eliminate waste and manual processes and become more streamlined and cost effective." That about says it all, in my opinion.

Without naming names, I will say it appears that Denver Health and Hospital Authority chose an IT consulting firm that successfully shepherded it through the years-long, several hundred applications implementation. This partner helped the healthcare system assess where it needed automation across its facilities. So there's another vote for choosing your IT partners, be they infrastructure or services, wisely, and to carefully map out a strategy.

Hopefully more healthcare systems will step forward and share their success stories.