A recent Information Week article on EHR adoption had the following quote:

“I think the number one driver [of ambulatory EHR adoption] is the change in reimbursement, the fact that it is becoming so complicated to document the process of care to get paid by the government as well as commercial payers,” said Nancy Fabozzi, a senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan and the report’s author. “Everybody thinks that fee-for-service is doomed and we have to have a new system of reimbursing physicians for the quality of care instead of the quantity of care because costs are exploding.”

In an interview with InformationWeek, Fabozzi said another reason for the adoption of ambulatory EHRs is that many providers have practice management systems that are old and need to be updated as they move to ICD-10 and HIPAA 5010 requirements.

It won’t be news to most of you that it’s not government incentive that is driving adoption of EHR software. The market forces are much stronger than any sort of stimulus. Although, the retarding forces of an unknown stimulus are starting to wear off and we should see EHR adoption pick up again soon.