Only 4% of docs have implemented electronic health records with all the bells and whistles that wonks say will make care safer and more efficient. And only another 13% have implemented electronic records of any sort.
The main factor preventing most physicians from adopting EHRs — all together now — is cost.
Those are the results of a survey sponsored by the feds and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and
published online today by the New England Journal of Medicine.
Richard Baron, a primary care doc who runs a five-physician practice in Philadelphia, spoke today on a conference call held to discuss the survey results. He presented a great in-the-trenches view of a small practice switching over to electronic records.
“We are much more likely to know what we need to know to meet our patients’ needs,” he said. For example, the group now runs reports on diabetics with poor blood sugar control who are overdue for appointments, and lets them know it’s time to come in. And the EHR makes it easy to see relevant context in a patient’s chart, such as why a medication was stopped.
At the same time, Baron called implementing the EHR “the most difficult thing we have ever done in our practice.”
“It disrupted every system we had in the office for doing daily work,” he said. “It made us dependent on a tech we did not understand and could not maintain ourselves.” It also cost $40,000 per doctor to set up, plus tens of thousands a year in annual maintenance costs.
The authors of the survey, most of whom are affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute for Health Policy, note that President Bush as well as the leading presidential candidates from both parties are big supporters of EHRs.
But widespread adoption could cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, much of which would likely have to come through government incentives. “[W]hether any future federal administration will find the resources is uncertain,” the authors write.
