The federal government would like to see a vast movement toward adopting Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by 2015. This is evident by the incentive programs that are included in the 2009 HITECH Act. Along with this act, the regulations set forth by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provide for a reduction of Medicare payments to providers who neglect to adopt EHR by the beginning of 2015. This mandate poses considerable challenges for the small clinic.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is charged with encouraging adoption of EHR technology, as envisioned in the 2009 American Reinvestment & Recovery Act (ARRA).
The vision of the ONC is that with this transformed health delivery system:
• Medical errors will be reduced
• …show more content…
In order to accomplish all of these tasks, small clinics and physicians throughout the nation need to adopt EHR technology. Reaching this goal is the challenge at hand.
Hospitals have the IT resources to implement EHR
While it is true that hospitals and large physician groups face their own challenges when it comes to implementing EHR systems, they have less difficulty incorporating EHR into their practice than the smaller clinics and physician practices do. This is because of the dedicated IT resources that hospitals and larger physician groups have available.
For this reason, the adoption of EHR is being seen mainly in hospitals and other larger institutions not in the smaller practice settings and clinics in the United States, which is where most of the health care is delivered.
Cost comparison
During the selection process, practitioners need to consider product cost. The costs vary depending on the type of configuration the practitioner selects.
Types of providers
There are Web-based Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Client/Server based