Technology Review: A Big Stimulus Boost for Electronic Health Records

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A Big Stimulus Boost for Electronic Health Records

Wiring up physicians from small practices will be one of the biggest hurdles.

Physicians and information specialists across the country are feverishly figuring out how to best prepare for the impending availability of $19 billion designated for health-care IT spending in the newly signed stimulus bill . Broadly deploying electronic health records (EHRs), they say, will require special support for small private practices across the country. These physicians provide up to 80 percent of the nation's health care, but fewer than 20 percent of them are currently using EHRs.

The bulk of the stimulus funds--$17 billion--will go toward incentives in the form of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for physicians and hospitals that use electronic systems. Starting in 2011, physicians using health information technologies, such as EHRs and electronic prescribing systems, will be eligible for $40,000 to $65,000, and hospitals will be eligible for several million dollars. The incentives would be phased out over time, with penalties for those who fail to adopt electronic records within five years. "I think many people were disappointed that incentives won't kick in for a couple of years," says David Bates , chief of the Division of General Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston. "But those incentives are going to be substantial, and I think [practices] will start to adopt electronic health records now."

Only about 4 to 25 percent of providers in the United States use electronic record-keeping systems, depending on the size of the practice. The bill won't require that all doctors use EHRs, or directly pay for the software. But its incentive program will help overcome the major barrier in getting physicians to adopt these systems. While doctors must spend $40,000 to $50,000 to buy an EHR system and may lose ...

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http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22203/?nlid=1798