Obama Administration To Help Medical Providers

Physicians are ditching expensive paper pads and sending electr

The push for electronic medical records has gone through fits and starts over the last decade, but the time may have finally arrived when it actually makes sense for physician offices to go through this disruptive innovation. A confluence of factors including the Obama stimulus bill, CMS incentives, and the rapid development of new and exciting technology has record numbers of doctors considering making the switch.

One of the exciting new technology innovations is the ability to deliver EMR over the web, rather than having to install the program locally. Web delivery drastically reduces EMR implementation costs because it eliminates the need to purchase expensive servers to host the program. A single physician practice purchasing a traditional EMR system may have to spend upwards of $25,000 just to get the hardware necessary to use the program. However, since most medical offices already have computers and internet connections, no additional hardware purchases are typically necessary to get started with a web-delivered EMR system. Additionally, web-delivered EMRs reduce a practice’s HIPAA liability because sensitive PHI is stored on the EMR vendor’s web servers, rather than on the medical practice’s local machines- partially pushing the burden of HIPAA compliance on to the EMR vendor.

The federal government is now offering several different incentive programs to encourage providers to begin using electronic medical records that in many cases covers a large portion, if not all of the costs associated with implementing an EMR system. The Obama Administration’s signature piece of legislation, “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” includes $20 billion of incentives intended to encourage EMR adoption. Under this bill, incentives begin in 2011, and a single provider can receive upwards of $44k over a 5 year period. Additionally, CMS is offering a bonus to physicians who use electronic prescriptions. The bonus is equal to 2% of a physician’s total charges billed to Medicare in 2009 and 2010, and then steps down by .5% each year through 2013. The CMS e-Prescribe bonus program could yield between $1,700 and $3,500 a year for a typical single-provider, primary care practice in 2009 and 2010. As is often the case with government programs, the details for the varying EMR adoption incentives are a bit murky and still being hashed-out, but medical providers around the country can rely on the fact that the government has pledged to make a large investment in Healthcare I.T., and as time goes on the pressure on practices to convert to an electronic medical records system will only intensify.

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