New federal standards unveiled in June require doctors to start using electronic medical records routinely, including logging patients' diagnoses and visits, ordering prescriptions, monitoring for drug interactions and making records accessible to other medical providers. Advocates say meeting the "meaningful use" standards will save lives, prevent errors, reduce waste and save money.
Doctors who use electronic record according to the standards by 2015 can collect as much as $64,000 each in federal stimulus funds to help them buy hardware and software. Those who don't comply by that date will see their Medicare or Medicaid payments trimmed by one percent per year.
Health care experts have estimated the cost of not having electronic medical records at nearly $78 billion a year. This includes such costs as sending lab results between hospitals and outside laboratories, needlessly duplicating medical procedures and shuttling paper charts among doctors. It is also estimated that just eliminating the phone calls between doctors and pharmacists alone would save nearly $2 billion each year.
Having immediate access to patient prior medical history could also save lives. In an emergency situation, knowing prescribed medications a patient is taking who has never been to that particular hospital before may prevent prescribing counter-effective drugs or performing procedures on someone who may be on high doses of blood thinners without taking the necessary precautions.
But purchasing the system and maintaining it annually is not cheap and many beilieve the stimulus grants will not always offset the costs. Some are concerned older doctors may not want to spend the amount it will take or may not want to learn the new technology opting to retire or close their practice. Other concerns of whether the systems can protect patients privacy have been raised as well as how often systems may become outdated but many doctors are still focusing on the positive and are embracing the change.
