Why More Physicians Will Adopt Electronic Health Records

By NIAM YARAGHI When President George W. Bush issued an executive order in April 2004 to establish the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, he had a clear vision in mind: to create a secure, nationwide interoperable network that allows authorized users to access medical records of anyone at anytime and anywhere in the U.S. President Barack Obama knew very well that his plan for providing health insurance to all Americans would not be successful unless it was paired with a plan for controlling the quality and cost of health care services. Ironically, Bush’s health IT network was (and remains) the instrumental element that guarantees the financial sustainability of Obamacare. It was no surprise that the economic stimulus package of 2009 allocated $25.9 billion for promoting the adoption and use of electronic health records systems among American physicians and hospitals. But a decade and $30 billion later, only half of the U.S. office-based physicians have adopted a basic electronic health records system and a mere 20 percent of them use such software, according to the latest statistics by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Now that the government funds for promoting adoption and use of such records are dried up, what will happen to the rest of doctors who have not ditched their old-school paper charts yet and still keep their patients’ records in a filing cabinet? In the following, I discuss three drivers which together will lead the other half of physicians to a...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs