EHR, All or Nothing

American Medical News reported that doctors are pushing back on penalties for not implementing EHRs. The reason for this push back is because they feel it unfairly punishes physicians who can’t afford the up-front cost of adopting an electronic medical record system.

Although their reason has some validity, let’s not lose site of the end goal, nationwide EHRs. If the penalties are removed, physicians would no longer be on a timetable to have an EHR system implemented. This would slow down the nationwide adoption of EHRs which could force the nation into two separate systems. One electronic system, whereas patient’s medical information could be shared only if all providers in the patient’s vertical supply chain have EHRs. Otherwise, the analog system would be engaged, which is what we have now.

Surely at some point in your career you’ve had the misfortune of being involved with a project that has kept, or attempted to keep, the legacy system functioning while the new system makes it through one cycle of processing. Whether that’s a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual cycle, what one quickly learn is after the new system has been operational for 4 or more hours, falling back to the legacy system is virtually impossible (riskier), or worst yet, its quickly discovered that the legacy system can NOT be turned off. Either scenario is not pretty.

The lesson that physicians must learned, that most IT professionals probably already know, is that negotiating to remove the penalties for providers that do not implement EHRs will be a zero-sum agreement, nationwide EHRs will not happen. When it comes to implementing EHRs, unfortunately you can’t “have your cake and eat it too.”

Read entire American Medical News article here.