There has also been an increasing interest in partnering with federal and private payors in risk-based contracting including shared savings and bundled payment models. Right now, only a few hospitals have implemented it but the over half of the respondents said that within the next 12 months they plan to start implementation.

Christianson thinks that eventually all hospitals will be using risk-based models. "I think that at some point, any hospital is going to need to be able to assess [the] risk of managing patients the way that health care is headed now in the United States," he added.


However, Christianson said that in his research, he found that hospitals have not reaped many benefits from EMRs yet. "They were supposed to speed things up, lead to efficiencies and help reduce costs but most executives are saying that it hasn't happened yet — they're still waiting for that cost benefit to come through from investing in EMR," he said.

But despite that, he believes that health care IT solutions will eventually help them save money. He explained that if there are two of the same organizations and one adopts the solutions and the other doesn't, the one that adopts the solutions will have better financial performance in the long run in this current health care climate.

ITG just began a new global hospital executives study and the results are expected to be published this September.

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