Four Ways To Jump-Start E-Health Record Adoption

Most of the 1,500 largest U.S. hospitals have already deployed electronic health record systems. Not so for the nation’s 700,000 practicing doctors. Less than 20% of them use EHR, and many aren’t using fully functional systems. So what’s at stake if all these doctors don’t get on board with deploying these systems? A lot.

Digitized records provide a timely, cost-effective way to share patient information. If physicians aren’t using them in their private practices, they lose those benefits, as do the hospitals they work with. Paper records continue to be shuffled, putting patients at risk for medical mistakes, ill-informed treatment decisions, and unnecessary tests because hospitals and doctors don’t have easy access to information about recent tests, health histories, and other important data.

There are looming financial implications as well. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, part of last year’s stimulus legislation, provides more than $20 billion in incentives to doctor practices, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations that show they’re making meaningful use of EHR. A first round of rules defining what constitutes meaningful use was released last month and includes some requirements that providers be able to electronically exchange patient data; later stages of rulemaking are likely to include more stringent requirements.

At risk are incentive payments of as much as $64,000 for a physician practice. For hospitals with fewer than 50 beds, incentives could run as high as $2.5 million, and for ones with 500 or more beds, as much as $5.2 million, according to the American Hospital Association. Penalties for non-compliance start in 2015, when physicians and hospitals that treat Medicare patients would see a reduction in fee reimbursements.

Source : http://www.ehrexperts.us/four-ways-to-jump-start-e-health-record-adoption/