Unemployed Americans will be cheered to see Practice Fusion, a free Web-based electronic medical record system. Physicians who adopt the free system will get $44,000 in cash from the federal government (i.e., taxpayer funds). http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos074.htm#earnings notes that the folks getting the free $44,000 have earnings “among the highest of any occupation” (median of $186,044 for primary care docs; $339,738 median for specialists).=
http://www.practicefusion.com/pages/HITECH_healthcare_stimulus.html explains “On February 17, 2009, President Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA). Under the economic stimulus plan, physicians and providers can qualify for $44,000 in Medicare incentives if they demonstrate ‘meaningful use’ of an Electronic Health Record starting in 2011.” The page goes on to explain additional $4,400 and $12,500 cash payments that are available as well as 4 percent bonuses of whatever Medicare is otherwise paying.
[You might ask how Practice Fusion gets paid for keeping their server hard drives spinning. They sell ads in the front and aggregate data out the back.]
Update (email today from a doctor friend): “I just got a letter from Medicare that I have to send them a check for $27.42 because they overpaid me for 67 patients with overpayment amounts ranging from $0.01 to $1.37 with the majority being in the $0.30 range. It’s their fault, since we bill the same for everything, and they overpaid me that penny.”
As a point of clarification, the physicians will never see that $44,000. It is virtually impossible to meet the moving target of criteria that is necessary to even qualify for it. And, that is the maximum allowed over several years. I suspect people will get on the order of magnitude of $3.50 after CMS takes out all sorts of fees, etc.
Given that I have one of these EMRs and I’m in the midst of sending my data to CMS to potentially get my $3.50, I’ll keep you up to date on the progress, or lack there of. (In fact, recently, they just changed it from getting money in 2012 to getting the money in 2014.)
At least one Hospital has received a payment: http://www.bidmc.org/News/AroundBIDMC/2011/May/Meaningfulusepayment.aspx .
We’ve just had a lecture from the CIO of BIDMC (video at http://www.scot-ship.ac.uk/halamka-video , view the slideshow alongside the video), who is part of the process of US electronic standards harmonization. In the video he talks about why he is trying to bring electronic standards into the health system – making sure that doctors can communicate electronically to reduce waste and mistakes. His blog is at http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/.
” the folks getting the free $44,000″
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Whatever your opinion of government incentive initiatives in general, it’s hardly “free” in this case. In fact, given the Meaningful Use compliance criteria that must be followed (no “partial credit,” either) in order to apply for the incentive reimbursements ($18,000 max in the first year for Medicare providers), I can rather easily demonstrate that any appreciable added labor burden (say, maybe an extra minute or two per encounter in chart documentation) will pretty much negate the added money.
Not that I’m an uncritical cheerleader for the program, by any means.
Practice Fusion is focused on delivering free technology to doctors, nurses and staff in small medical practices across the country. Primary care physicians make earn an average of $120K annually and haven’t had a raise in 20 years.
The price tag of and EMR is roughly $50,000 for planning, buying, implementing and operating an EMR system for the first year in a five-physician primary care practice. So it’s true, many physicians will not get to keep their $44k.
Legacy EHR vendors should really be the target of taxpayers with their artificially high installation and upgrade costs.