HITECH Act 2009 - EHR Opportunities
On February 17, 2009, President Barak Obama signed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, as part of the stimulus package ( American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)). The act is aimed at encouraging the doctors to adopt of electronic health records (EHRs) through incentive payments to physicians.
How much Doctors can gain
Each doctor can gain $44,000 in the time period between 2011 to 2015. Doctors who see more madicaid patients stand to make more money. But majority of the Doctors stand to make $44,000 over a period of four years if the adopt the EHR system.
Who Can provide EHR service
If you think you can provide EHR system you need to qualify EHR technology. Qualified EHR technology means that the EHR is certified to meet standards. This standard includes patient demographic and clinical health information. The EHR system should support medical history and problem lists, and should have the capacity to provide decision support for physician order entry, to capture and query healthcare quality information, and to exchange electronic health information with other sources.
Will Physician Adopt EHR
The incentive in itself be not good enough for the doctors to adopt EHR system. However, many companies are developing the EHR system and they will provide solutions that will become lucrative enough for the individual doctors.
A typical scenario could be a telemedicine company A providing telehealth solution. The company A may provide EHR system in addition to the telemedicine facility to the doctor. The solution, then may become very lucrative to the doctors to adopt.
Will they adopt? My father’s office has been paperless since 1994. He designed and built an EMR system from scratch from the late 80’s into the early 90’s and my older brother who is now a physician, is also paperless considering before he bacame a doctor, he wrote my dad’s system. We sold EMR systems to a few doctors back in the mid-90’s however we were so far ahead in technology that physicians were afraid to adopt it. My father’s records held up in several court cases as well as a strict HIPAA compliance test. Will they accept EMR….well maybe if it is shoved down their throats…why? Because a physician wants a tool to make his practice more efficient instead of a govermnent mandate that makes the doctor practice governmental medicine. My dad did NOT want a system designed by ‘techies’ he wanted it designed by ‘PRACTICING’ physicians not desk-jocky physicians. Just my 2 cents. You see, I have been involved with ERM, medical billing systems, drug interaction databases, nursing notes, etc…. since the late 1980’s. Sure, they will accept it if it is developed the right way and makes sense to their practice.
@Mark Palen
Well said. Well designed systems are intended to help the physicians do their work efficiently.
We are also creating an online system which will focus on the interaction between Physicians and patients. Would you or your father would be interested in participating the pilot phase we would be launching early next month? You can also check out the alpha version of our site at http://www.ezdia.com.
Do let me know if you are interested and we can discuss on this further.
Regards,
Anand