“We now have the ability to track a patient as they move through the health-care system, and we’re going to keep moving toward more of that kind of intelligence,” he says. Still, Morgan encourages physicians - rural or not - to be patient as EHR technology evolves. Rural physicians often have trouble getting IT support and access to high-speed broadband, which is necessary to run an EHR properly. “I spoke with a doctor who was getting so frustrated with his EHR, the patient was actually getting concerned about the doctor’s own health,” he says.įor rural clinics, the problem isn’t so much implementation as maintenance, says Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association. And Boyd often hears complaints from doctors about the interface, which they say wasn’t designed with a clinician in mind. Additional maintenance expenses in the first year can be around $85,000. “You also can’t see the same number of patients while you get used to the system.”įor a five-physician clinic, the initial cost to implement an EHR is around $162,000. “If you have a smaller practice, it’s expensive,” Boyd says. Andy Boyd, a professor of health information sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, sympathizes with the holdouts. This was likely a big reason the number of doctors using EHRs jumped to 50 percent in 2013 and then to 75 percent by the end of 2014.īut the incentive program is going to be phased out by the end of the year, which leaves some wondering what can be done to reach physicians who still rely mostly on paper. Since 2009, the Obama administration has been offering financial incentives to certain doctors and hospitals that can demonstrate “meaningful use” of EHRs incentives can amount to as much as $63,000. Only 34 percent of doctors surveyed by the American Medical Association said they were happy with their electronic systems. For those who do, frustrations with the technology are well documented. Our productivity went down 25 percent.”Ībout one-fifth of doctors don’t have an electronic health record system, commonly called an EHR, implemented in their offices. “The primary function was to enhance billing, not to build a physician-patient relationship. “What we found was a system that just wasn’t patient-centered,” Ciampi says.

Ciampi doesn’t have anything against technology, but a failed attempt to go electronic several years ago left him frustrated.

He has no plans to implement an electronic health records system anytime soon. Michael Ciampi runs a family medical practice in Portland, Maine, that’s still entirely reliant on paper records.

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