Under Obamacare, doctors can get a $44,000 reimbursement for switching to an EMR (electronic medical records) system.
The EMR software typically can run somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. A doctors’ office can get $44,000 per doctor. If the office has four doctors, the office can get $176,000 best-case scenario. If the practice pays $10,000 or $15,000 for a software package, the practice still gets the $44,000 checks (for each doctor), paid over a three-year period. The longer it takes to get on the EMR system, the less of that $44,000 you get and there’s a schedule that tells us what that amount is. By 2014, you are required to be on an EMR system or you will not be able to get paid from the government. More importantly, the government is giving you the reimbursement of $44,000 per doctor to acquire this EMR system. You shouldn’t have any reason not to buy it. Next year, it will drop and then the year after that, it will drop again. The early bird gets the worm.
Still, doctors are hesitant. They realize EMR has a value and a purpose. It’s just that the transition and the learning curve slow them down. They have to get everybody trained on EMR. It may take some doctors four to five months to get through the whole process and get used to the new software. But like anything else, the only thing that is constant is change.
Sometimes the hesitation is justified and I have a solution for that. If you have been in practice 15-plus years, you’re going to have thousands of files of patient paper that you or your staff will have to convert. That’s going to be very costly and time-consuming. So what we suggest is that rather than trying to go back in to convert all those files into an EMR system, do this. Convert the files as each patient comes in. This will help you break the task into bite-sized pieces, provide great customer service to your patients and not waste time on patient charts for patients who may never walk in your door again.
There’s an old tale. Three men are standing at a train station. The first one says “the train is approaching.” The second one says “the train is here” and the third one says “what train”? You have to decide which man you will be.
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