Dr. Sullivan is a practicing cardiologist who joined DrFirst in 2004, just after completing his term as President of the Massachusetts Medical Society. He is known throughout the healthcare industry as the father of the Continuity of Care Record (“CCR”) and a leader on the future of healthcare technology. He is assisting DrFirst in ensuring that Rcopia continues to add the functionality necessary to maintain its leadership position both in electronic prescribing and in the channel of communication between various sectors of the healthcare community and the physician. Dr. Sullivan is active in organized medical groups at the state and national level, and is both a delegate to the AMA and the Chairperson of their Council on Medical Service as well as past Co-Chair of the Physicians EHR Consortium.

The buzz surrounding Electronic Health Records (EHR) is nothing short of constant.  The daunting task of selection, purchase and implementation is quite confusing, technical, and expensive, with many physicians, clinics and health systems uncertain of their needs and questioning how the technology is going to impact the way they practice medicine and their bottom line. It’s all about workflow and productivity.

More recently, Providers are faced with the intimidating task of deciding which kind of system to install. There are all inclusive systems, often referred to as fully paperless or standard EHRs and there are so called a la carte systems known as modular EHRs.

The Case for Modular

Modular EHR systems allow providers to take a stepping stone approach to health IT clinical documentation and order writing, by choosing the tools and functions which make the most sense in their practices and clinics; improving specialized workflow and efficiency.  Going the modular route can gradually ease the provider and the office staff into a more paperless environment without having to make a full and often-times difficult transition to a fully paperless workspace.

There is need for caution however. The sheer volume of modules available can make selecting appropriate ones an overwhelming task.  Not only do clinicians need to be wary of which modules they are choosing, but also what functions have been certified by an authorized organization.

By combining specific modular systems, it can become “qualified,” making the user eligible for the monetary reimbursements set forth by Title IV of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

At DrFirst, our Rcopia-MU^TM has taken all of the guess work out of this process and is a completely certified Modular EHR that physicians can implement and start earning incentive money directly out-of-the-box.

The implementation of a complete EHR system can be confusing and time consuming.  Herein lays some distinct advantages of implementing a modular EHR.  Practices that have already implemented e-prescribing or registry modules may not need to relearn a different system, or move their data from one to another (as long as the current module is certified).

Providers who are considering going the modular route can check the certification status of their options at Certified Health IT Products List. The cost for a modular approach is often much less expensive and providers can select the modules from various vendors to meet their financial and practice-based needs.  Upon implementation, providers must show they’re using certified EHR technology in measureable ways to receive their incentive monies from the Federal Government.  With this very high ROI, many providers see the advantage of using the modular approach to postpone the decision process in selecting a complete EHR and yet at the same time earn Meaningful Use incentive money to put towards the cost of  the much more expensive system.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, doctors who have not adopted an EHR (either modular or complete) by 2015 will be penalized by Medicare — a 1% penalty to begin, then up to 3% within three years. Many providers are banking on the reimbursement that has been made available by the ARRA to help offset the initial costs.

What is your practice considering, complete EHR or modular? Do you see benefits of one over the other?

From the American Medical Association comes a recent story on EMRs and the paperless medical office. I think it touches quite effectively on the issue facing medical offices today – transitioning new patients to the new EMR has proved a lot easier than turning older paper records electronic. In one of my earlier posts, I’d written about this topic. This article provides some clever strategies in identifying which paper records to convert earlier than others.

Among the points discussed:
- EMR use does not equal paperless: And yet, these two ideas somehow seem conflated in people’s minds. A doctor I spoke to recently said he had assumed that the EMR vendor would convert older paper records to electronic as part of the EMR purchase package. Well, the vendor might – for a fee. Electronic conversion ranges from simple paper scans to character/word recognition. For truly rich use of your data, say for report generation purposes, you’ll want something that populates a database. In fact, “data transfer probably is going to be a significant line item in the EMR budget.”

- Not all data is equal: Having an EMR doesn’t mean that every little scrap of paper from the patient’s records needs to go into it. Doctors can make the call on the kind of data that they find most useful. It would however need some amount of planning and insight, not to mention time, to make this happen. What’s important depends on specialty as well.

- Not all patients are equal: If a small proportion of patients you see tend to be the ones that come for repeat consults, it might make more sense to get the entirety of their paper records into the EMR.

- Don’t make a beeline for the shredder immediately: Really, this should be self-intuitive. Unless you’re sure that every important piece of information you need has been transferred to the EMR, and the EMR data matches what’s on paper, don’t shred the patient’s records.

The only real quibble I have with the article was where it mentions that one company found that “having the doctors enter the data ensured the integrity of the information and helped them learn the new system.” Seriously? Have your $200+ per hour physician enter older records into an EMR, when you can get a temp or third-party vendor to do it for a fraction of the cost?

The statistics at the end of the article are quite interesting. The first statistic is especially encouraging.

A survey of 200 health IT professionals found that hospitals are taking varied approaches to digitizing their records. (Respondents could give more than one answer.)
49% have scanned what they need and stayed within their budget.
23% are within budget but still have a backlog of records to scan.
54% are scanning records onsite.
29% are using a centralized scanning location.
72% are relying on full-time employees to scan.
9% are using third parties.
6% are using part-time staff.
44% are not explicitly measuring the effectiveness or productivity of their scanning process.
58% plan to shred paper records once scanning is complete.
38% plan to store paper files in onsite records rooms or offsite storage facilities.

Source: Survey by information management company Iron Mountain, July

Last month, the AMA announced that it was launching a health IT portal for doctors.  The AMAGINE platform includes a fairly robust range of products, including three EMRs, and its price range seems pretty reasonable. Still, I’m somewhat skeptical it will be popular. Lest I be accused of being arbitrary, let me explain.

On the surface, the idea or and product line sound great. In addition to the EMRs, the lineup includes e-prescribing, claims management and clinical support systems as well as reference tools. Vendors involved include Allscripts, CareTracker, Quest Care360, NextGen and DocSite.

Subscriptions to the surface range from $20 per month for e-prescribing to $300 per month for the EMR options, numbers that aren’t likely to send most practices into shock.

Not only that, the AMA seems to have preliminary evidence that this approach works. The trade group pilot-tested the AMAGINE on Michigan doctors for about two years prior to going national, and has to assume that the physician association would have pulled the plug if the pilot went badly.

All that being said, I’m still pretty skeptical that the approach will work, for reasons including the following:

* Despite its being the best-known and largest physician group in the U.S., the AMA doesn’t have a great reputation with up-and-coming young physicians who are first to adopt health IT

* It may sound counterintuitive, but I don’t think doctors want the AMA or anyone else to narrow down their EMR choices. Given the stakes involved, my sense is that physicians want to do a lot of exploring before they commit their lives and workflow to a new system.

* While a best-of-breed portal approach may actually be a good idea, I have a gut feeling that it might actually overwhelm or confuse some physicians. (If it were me, I’d be thinking “One decision at a time please!”)

* Say what you like about vendor technical support, but I bet any decent player would offer better technical support, education and training than an AMA venture.

So, what do you think? Am I off base here, or is AMAGINE going to face an uphill battle?

I love the title of this post since it uses the word change. People when they see change start to get really concerned. For some reason we don’t generally like change. We often like it after the fact, but rarely want to engage in change. I’ll be the first to tell you that implementing an EMR requires change. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably has something to sell you. Certainly some EMR require more change than others, but they all require a change.

The American Medical News put out an interesting article discussing what they said would be 5 ways meaningful use will change your practice. Here’s their 5 ways and my commentary on each of the items:

Patients will be more involved in their care – Certainly meaningful use has some requirements that encourage the sharing of clinical information with the patient. I expect in future meaningful use stages we’ll see even more sharing of the clinical information with the patient. However, I don’t really see this sharing as translating to a more involved patient. Tons of people miss incorrect charges on their bank account and credit card statements and they have all that information. I’m sure the same will happen as patients get access to this information. Many won’t care to look and many of those that do look won’t have much of an idea what they’re looking at.

With this said, there is a general movement to the active and involved patient. Combine the easy access to health information (good and bad information I might add), the easy social interactions amongst patients (ie. asking your friends on Facebook), and other changes we see in society and the patients will be more involved going forward. I just don’t see meaningful use being a huge driver for this.

Doctors will find it easier to see how they’re doing – Ummm…this seems way off base to me. First, because it’s pretty hard to define “how they’re doing.” So, it makes it hard to talk about. Let’s just focus on the meaningful use measures. Does anyone really think that tracking the meaningful use measures is going to make a doctor better at what they’re doing? Can they really be used to measure how well a doctor is doing? I guess I just don’t think meaningful use is the right “report card” for doctors.

Physicians will collaborate more with other doctors – Stage 1 definitely does little to help this happen more efficiently. We’ll see if stage 2 or 3 takes it much farther. Although, if stage 3 takes it too far, I imagine many will opt out of showing meaningful use for stage 3 since the payouts are so small at the end of the EHR incentive money.

Long term, having an EMR will facilitate collaboration and information sharing amongst doctors. However, we don’t have the highways for that information built yet.

Physicians will pinpoint practice inefficiencies – This feels a little like the second one to me. However, it’s worth also pointing out that I think it would be a very difficult argument to make that meaningful use somehow makes a practice more efficient. I could certainly make an argument (which I’m sure many would love to argue against) that an EMR can make a clinic more efficient, but not meaningful use.

Physicians will need a firmer grip on data security – MU stage 1 has little HIPAA requirements and I don’t expect MU stage 2 and 3 to change that. There are some privacy and security requirements in the EHR certification that try and take data security and privacy in an EMR to the next level. Also, the HITECH act has provided some “teeth” to the enforcement of HIPAA which it never had before. I still think we need a few more clinics to get “bitten” by it to really understand what the requirements are going to be and how they’re going to enforce it.

The AMA has finally weighed in on the meaningful use final rule and it’s not a glowing recommendation for meaningful use and the changes that were made. Here’s a short summary from the Wall Street Journal healthcare blog.

Now, after “careful review,” the AMA is weighing in. In a memo [PDF] to its board of trustees, the group’s CEO, Michael Maves, says that while “the Administration did move on several points, the [AMA] believes that it will be challenging for many physicians to participate successfully in the program. This will be especially true for those physicians in solo or small group practices who have not previously utilized an EHR.” (That refers to an electronic health record — the Health Blog has traditionally used “electronic medical record.” Tomatoes, tomahtoes.)

The AMA had pressed for reducing the number of criteria physicians needed to meet in order to get the first round of incentives from the original mandated 25 to a choice of any five of those. The final requirements include a “core” group of 15 requirements; providers must choose an additional five from the remaining items. That “is still too high,” the group says.

In addition, the group says no currently available EMR does everything that docs will need to do to meet the requirement — though products should be available this fall — making it tough to ramp up before the beginning of the incentive program. Also included on the list of what the AMA calls “remaining challenges”: high threshold requirements for many of the requirements, a lack of focus on how usable the systems are and the absence of an appeals process for docs if they are declared ineligible for incentives.

I got the following email that I just couldn’t resist posting. I’m not sure who deserves credit for this, but I think that many will enjoy the perspective.

The American Medical Association has weighed in on the new Obama health care proposals.

The Allergists voted to scratch it, but the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves. The Gastroenterologists had sort of a gut feeling about it, but the Neurologists thought the Administration had a lot of nerve..

The Obstetricians felt they were all laboring under a misconception. Ophthalmologists considered the idea shortsighted. Pathologists yelled; “Over my dead body!” while the Pediatricians said, “Oh, Grow up!”

The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while the Radiologists could see right through it. Surgeons decided to wash their hands of the whole thing. The Internists thought it was a bitter pill to swallow, and the Plastic Surgeons said, “This puts a whole new face on the matter….”

The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists were pissed off at the whole idea. The Anesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and the Cardiologists didn’t have the heart to say no.

In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision up to the assholes in Washington.