An electronic health record is a digital version of a patient’s chart that contains the patient’s medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images, and laboratory and other test results. This new EHR system will eliminate the waste of paper and cut many unnecessary …show more content…
By refusing the new system implemented by President Obama, healthcare providers are refusing to provide a more efficient, productive, and safer way to care for their patients. The penalty for not switching over to an electronic health records system is a 1% decrease in the Medicare physician fee schedule amount for covered professional services each year and the percentage of decrease goes up each year by another 1%. “This means that overall, a private practice with $500,000 of annual income that fails to meet the electronic medical records mandate will lose $1000 in payments in 2015, $2000 in 2016, and so on.”(MedicalRecords.com). There should not be any further extensions or exceptions for healthcare providers who do not switch to electronic health records systems within the five year time frame. Healthcare providers have already been given five years to switch over to an EHR system and that is a very reasonable amount of time. There should be no reason as to why healthcare providers should not be able to fully provide an electronic health records system within the five years that President Obama