US doctors paid €30,000 to use EHR

Tags: Government WHO

25 Jan 2010

North Shore Hospital Group on Long Island, New York is offering 7,000 doctors incentives of up to €28,500 each over five years to adopt digital patient records.

The hospital has already made a €284m ($400m) commitment to digitise patient records throughout its system, which includes 13 hospitals, following the promise made last year by Barack Obama that all Americans would have an electronic health record within five years.

The US president committed €13.5billion ($19 billion) of incentive payments to computerise patient records in order to improve care and reduce costs.

North Shore Hospital Group has said it will pay doctors 50% of the total cost of electronic health records that can communicate between the doctor’s office, labs and hospitals.

The subsidy will rise to 85% for doctors who agree to share data on patient measures, including glucose levels for people with diabetes and post operative procedures and prescriptions for heart patients.

The initiative at North Shore will begin with 100 physicians before it is rolled out further.

The hospital group will deploy the EHR via tablet personal computers from Dell and software from AllScripts, which can be retrieved by a doctor using PCs, BlackBerrys and iphones.

Glen Tullman, chief executive of Allscripts told the New York Times: “This is big enough and bold enough that hospital groups across the country will take notice and rethink their own plans.

“This was not done on pure dollars-and-cents, return-on-investment perspective. But better healthcare and getter quality should be a good investment.”

The €28,500 ($40,000) is in addition to government support for computerising patient records which can award doctors €31,000 ($44,000) over the same period.

Sarah Bruce

Reader's Comments

Slightly confused... bribery, support or rational investment?

maryhawking@tigers.demon.co.uk

27 Jan 10 19:01

The article seems to imply that this is straightforward bribery: "use an EHR - any EHR - and we'll pay you" sums which, I suspect, are relatively trivial in the total costs of running a doctors practice

(I'm a GP in England - so an independent contractor used to balancing money coming in, what is required to obtain that money and whether the work and systems required will actually benefit the practice and the patients registered with the practice.)

It isn't clear whether this is one specific system, (seems likely if the software and some of the hardware is listed), whether it is solely for doctors (doubt it - medical care has advanced since Dr Findlay!), what the support is and how well-suited it is to the needs of the individual physician - both the attendings and any medical staff in any residency program (it is across 13 hospitals..)

Encouraging physicians and practices without electronic records or, at the least, the ability to access data - such as lab, radiology and visits to other medical services - is obviously a Good Idea: providing or sponsoring a system which is seen by the local health community as a "killer app" is even better.