Two Of Three Doctors Dissatisfied With Current EHR System
Most physicians say incentives ‘not nearly enough’ to cover costs of EHR implementation
Even though the Medicare EHR MU incentive program was put in place to help with the costs of implementation, 70 percent of physicians in a recent survey said they do not believe that digitizing patient records has been worth it, according to Medical Economics. Despite the incentives offered to qualifying physicians, some “say it's not nearly enough to cover the increasing costs of implementation, training, annual licensing fees, hardware and associated services.
“But the most dramatic unanticipated costs were associated with the need to increase staff, coupled with a loss in physician productivity." A respondent to one survey held said that "We used to see 32 patients a day with one tech, and now we struggle to see 24 patients a day with four techs. And we provide worse care."
There are numerous reasons why many are so unhappy with the current EHR system. "Dissatisfaction is as diverse as the user's expectations in the first place, experts say, and to truly understand the reasons for it might be based on a litany of factors like computer competency, practice size, organizational structure, clinical and business process, hardware, speed of system, access points within the practice and attitudes about technology in the first place," further explains Medical Economics.
Healthcare IT News explains "docs who were surveyed expressed concern that current EHR technology interferes with face-to-face discussions with patients, requires physicians to spend too much time performing clerical work and degrades the accuracy of medical records by encouraging template-generated notes."
For those unsatisfied with their current EHR system, there are solutions to make things run more smoothly. Medscape encourages practices to "make decisions about redesigning how your practice is going to operate" in regards to the EHR system. Lack of training, the commitment to redesign the entire workflow perspective, the inability to accept the many changes associated with the new EHR system, are all valid reasons for why the EHR system is not popular with many practices. With proper training and plenty of time to adapt to the changes, it is likely that physicians will soon welcome the EHR system instead of finding it cumbersome.