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Health care is a right. Is someone preventing you from receiving or giving health care?
Obamacare is now preventing people from being able to afford health-care!
Doctors visits around here increased 75% this year due to the electronic record requirements in the health-care law. Lets hear it for Obamacare.
Electronic Health Records are a very heavy toll for small practice.
Start-up costs - In a survey by DesRoches et al. (2008), 66% of physicians without EHRs cited capital costs as a barrier to adoption, while 50% were uncertain about the investment. Around 56% of physicians without EHRs stated that financial incentives to purchase and/or use EHRs would facilitate adoption. In 2002, initial costs were estimated to be $50,000–70,000 per physician in a 3-physician practice. Since then, costs have decreased with increasing adoption. A 2011 survey estimated a cost of $32,000 per physician in a 5-physician practice during the first 60 days of implementation.
One case study by Miller et al. (2005) of 14 small primary-care practices found that the average practice paid for the initial and ongoing costs within 2.5 years. A 2003 cost-benefit analysis found that using EMRs for 5 years created a net benefit of $86,000 per provider.
Some physicians are skeptical of the positive claims and believe the data is skewed by vendors and others with a interest in EHR implementation.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, estimated it achieved net savings of $5 million to $10 million per year following installation of a computerized physician order entry system that reduced serious medication errors by 55 percent. Another large hospital generated about $8.6 million in annual savings by replacing paper medical charts with EHRs for outpatients and about $2.8 million annually by establishing electronic access to laboratory results and reports.
Maintenance costs - Maintenance costs can be high. Miller et al. found the average estimated maintenance cost was $8500 per FTE health-care provider per year.
Furthermore, software technology advances at a rapid pace. Most software systems require frequent updates, often at a significant ongoing cost. Some types of software and operating systems require full-scale re-implementation periodically, which disrupts not only the budget but also workflow. Costs for upgrades and associated regression testing can be particularly high where the applications are governed by FDA regulations (e.g. Clinical Laboratory systems). Physicians desire modular upgrades and ability to continually customize, without large-scale reimplementation.
Training costs - Training of employees to use an EHR system is costly, just as for training in the use of any other hospital system. New employees, permanent or temporary, will also require training as they are hired.
In the United States, a substantial majority of healthcare providers train at a VA facility sometime during their career. With the widespread adoption of the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) electronic health record system at all VA facilities, few recently-trained medical professionals will be inexperienced in electronic health record systems. Older practitioners who are less experienced in the use of electronic health record systems will retire over time.
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