| Study: ROI on Electronic Patient Records |
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| Written by Cynthia Atoji | ||||||||
| Monday, 23 November 2009 11:26 | ||||||||
 The business value of information technology is a topic that is cause for a lot of discussion. What is the ROI (Return On Investment), for example, for adopting Electronic Medical Records (EMR)? There are skeptics and true believers.
The true believers say that computerized patient records will save the U.S. healthcare system up to $100 billion a year. The skeptics respond by saying EMRs have little impact on the cost – or quality – of healthcare, and they now have a new study to back up their claims. The research, conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health, compared 3,000 hospitals and found that little benefit has been seen so far in electronic patient records. There were marginal differences, for example, in reducing hospital length of stays for hospitals with full-blown digital record systems (5.5 days) and those without (5.7). So installing technology didn’t necessarily equate for gains in cost containment and quality. | ||||||||
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About the Author: Jeff Merron is a full-time freelance editor, journalist, and copywriter who has written for the New York Times Magazine, ESPN.com, Slate, Byte Magazine, Macworld, Consumers Digest, and many other national publications. He's also a regular contributor to IT Business Insider and 108, a baseball magazine. He has a Ph.D. in Mass Communication Research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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We are not in the age of Star Trek just yet.
The main purpose of EMR is so that the Govt. can mandate and request Physician-Patient records on convenient disks.
EMR requires Way more valuable physician time. They are filled with NEW errors, because unless the Physician personally corrects (very time consuming) the machine dictations themselves, there would be way more errors in the system. These errors will look official, because they are printed, instead of handwritten by the Physician.
Noone seems to understand that any savings is sacrificed by addition time spent by the Physician or the Physician practice.
EMR should be totally voluntary, and only if in the best interest of the individual practice. They should work best for large practices, that can afford to have their own IT person/people.
Noone asked the opinion of Physicians before this was implemented. Physicians want to keep the convenient Paper Charts that are Sooo easy to follow.
Practices using EMR waste massive time Scanning documents all day.
In summary, any benefits to the system are being passed onto physicians as they are spending extra time. There should be NO MANDATES, especially for small practices. The current legislation calls for a 4% reduction in Medicare payments if not implemented by 2014!
We will drop out of Medicare or retire if that happens.