The goal of Electronic Health Record (EHR) adoption is to help healthcare providers build a sustainable practice and improve the safety and quality of health care. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have already made over 144,000 payments amounting to $7.1 billion to professionals and hospitals as financial incentives to help make the transition to EHR. From the year 2011 to 2022, CMS is expected to pay out $22.5 billion to healthcare providers who adopt EHR technology. In 2015, providers who do not make the switch to EHRs will face penalties and lose out on Medicare and Medicaid incentives.
Despite all these incentives, there are still many providers out there who are not ready to implement EHRs and who are still using paper charts and handwritten prescriptions. The main excuses given relate to costs, fears of increased workload lack of technical knowledge and inability to choose from the various EHR software platforms in the market.
Experts point out that most of these fears are unwarranted. Costs of EHR implementation include hardware, software, implementation assistance, training and ongoing network fees and maintenance. Physician practices can avail of assistance from their respective Regional Extension Center (REC) to calculate how much EHR implementation will cost them. Physicians may also be eligible for free or reduced-price support. In any case, delaying adoption is only going to result in penalties that will reduce their reimbursements.
Proper and systematic training including real patient interaction training can help manage increased workload issues, say experts. As far as choosing an appropriate EHR system is concerned, physicians can always rely on professional assistance. Experienced consultants can help them choose a software platform that can best meet their specific needs. Most EHRs are also user-friendly and physicians do not have to be particularly tech-savvy to work on them.
Feeding information into your EHR system can be a time consuming task and for that physicians can rely on a professional medical transcription service provider that has the resources to accomplish the task. A reliable medical transcription company can help healthcare providers achieve compliance, improve patient care, and enhance revenue.
