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Vice President Joe Biden today announced that $1.2 billion in federal stimulus money will be set aside to help hospitals implement electronic medical records (EMR) systems.
The program is expected to award twenty grants to hospitals and clinics in the first quarter of 2010, with another 25 grants awarded in the third quarter of 2010 with the remainder to be granted during the fourth quarter of that year.
This is good use of economic stimulus funding, particularly for investments in medical technologies that have been proven to reduce medical errors, reduce misdiagnoses and improve patient outcomes. It’s also good news for many of the nation’s non-profit hospitals that have struggled to remain financially viable and haven’t been able to dole out tens of thousands or even millions of dollars to implement EMR systems.
Still, it remains to be seen whether the so-called Health Information Technology Extension Program will be enough to kick-start the abysmal adoption rate of EMR systems by clinicians and hospitals. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, just 1.5% of U.S. hospitals have implemented comprehensive EMR systems. As of early 2008, just 4% of U.S. physicians reported to be using fully-functioning electronic records systems.
There are multiple reasons for the lousy adoption rates, including a lack of available capital among cash-strapped hospitals and clinics as well as gaps in healthcare data standards and interoperability issues between different healthcare systems. But one of the biggest stumbling blocks has been a reluctance among physicians, specialists and clinicians to use these systems, despite their well-documented benefits.
Part of the adoption problem cited by healthcare industry CIOs is that specialists such as cardiologists don’t want to be bothered with learning how to use these systems, devoting the time needed for training or make any adjustments to their work processes. To sweeten the pot, Medicare and some healthcare insurers such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts Inc. have offered pay for performance incentives aimed at enticing physicians to use EMR systems.
The program announced by Vice President Biden, under the guidance of the Department of Health and Human Services, plans to create 70 ‘regional centers’ to provide support and technical assistance to at least 100,000 primary care providers. Under the program, the regional centers are expected to focus their most intensive technical assistance on small group practices of ten clinicians or less. Officials in Biden’s office said the program will provide incentives for healthcare providers who make extensive use of EMR systems beginning in 2010, though it’s not altogether clear what those incentives will be and how they’ll be structured.
Still, it’s a carrot for small group practices that handle the lion’s share of the nation’s medical care. I’ve talked to quite a few IT managers and other administrators at such practices and one of the biggest roadblocks for them to install an EMR system is the amount of upheaval it creates.
Think about it. Let’s say you’re a general practitioner who works with a handful of other doctors, nurse practitioners and other clinicians to service a community of a few thousand people. If you live in a rural or surburban community, you know how busy these practices are.
Most of these clinics have rudimentary medical systems in place. It’s a huge amount of work and aggravation for everyone who works there to try to install a full-blown EMR system over the course of a few weeks while trying to handle a comparable patient load.
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