But we’re not getting what we expected from this technology. Today, more than 80% of physicians have implemented some form of EHR system. “The goal of the meaningful-use program was to encourage physician adoption of EHRs. She said her three-physician practice has spent $84,000 on EHR and related IT costs, yet she doesn’t plan to continue its use, preferring instead to take a financial penalty, because she’s so dissatisfied with the limitations of the system.Ĭarl Cameron says a key goal of electronic health records is sharing patient information across the continuum of providers - no easy feat.“Physicians are trying to use EHRs to improve patient care, investing a lot of time and money into making them work, but they are being thwarted,” Stack wrote. Steven Stack, president of the American Medical Assoc., recently wrote an article in which he detailed cases like that of a Georgia physician in pulmonary critical care and sleep medicine who was an early adopter of EHR technology in 2006, more than three years before the legislation that mandated it and established the first deadlines. Today, well over 80% of all physician practices in Massachusetts have established EHRs - for practices with more than 10 doctors, the figure is close to 100% - but not without frustration, cost, and a large dose of uncertainty. However, when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) created mandates in 2009 for hospitals and other providers to move toward EHR use (the term is used interchangeably with EMR, or electronic medical record), they didn’t anticipate the sheer number of different systems that would arise and the confusion they would engender. Basically, if you have a sore throat or something else is wrong with you, you call the doctor’s office, they see you and document it, and nobody else may ever see that note.” If you end up in the emergency room, the doctor can see the information about your last visit or past visits to the primary-care office. “If your primary-care doctor sends you a referral to a specialist, they can share information back and forth. That’s what everyone wants … to share information across the continuum,” said Carl Cameron, chief operating officer at Holyoke Medical Center, before offering an example of what an effective EHR system would accomplish. “The big push for us is still meaningful use and the sharing of data. The path to get there … well, that’s a bit thornier. The goals of electronic health records are easily understood. In practice, the technology simply hasn’t worked as designed, an opinion summed up in these comments from the head of the American Medical Assoc.: “Physicians are trying to use EHRs to improve patient care, investing a lot of time and money into making them work, but they are being thwarted.” The objective was and still is to improve communication and share important medical information. Implementation of electric health records (EHR) has been a process defined by clearly stated goals and - thus far - frustrating results.
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