AAFP offers members a technology price break

The deal gives doctors discounts of up to 50% on EMR software and computer hardware.

By Tyler Chin, amednews staff. Dec. 22/29, 2003.

The American Academy of Family Physicians has negotiated an agreement under which its 94,000 members can buy electronic medical records software and computer hardware at substantial discounts from several technology vendors.

The initiative, called Partners for Patients, is designed to help doctors overcome "the biggest roadblock" preventing them from implementing EMR systems, which is cost, said AAFP President Michael Fleming, MD.

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Depending on the product and the size of a physician practice, seven companies -- A4Health Systems, GE Medical Systems Information Technologies, MedPlexus Inc, NextGen Healthcare Information Systems Inc., Physician Micro Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., and Welch-Allyn Inc. -- have agreed to offer AAFP members discounts of 15% to 50%.

The medical society launched its initiative because it wants to encourage doctors to adopt EMRs to improve patient safety and patient care, said David Kibbe, MD, director of the AAFP's Center for Health Information Technology.

So far fewer than 10% of the medical society's members use EMRs. However, thousands have told the society that they are interested in implementing them but couldn't afford the technology's startup costs, which typically range from $25,000 to $50,000 per physician, he said.

The society's vendor initiative marks the end of another effort it launched earlier this year, when it asked several other medical societies to form and finance a nonprofit foundation to spur development and distribution of a low-cost, open-source EMR for physicians. "For now, we've abandoned that idea [because] we could not get the support we needed to pull that off," Dr. Kibbe said.

The AAFP became the second society within the last three months to announce deals to make technology more affordable. In October, the Massachusetts Medical Society signed an agreement under which its 18,000 members could receive discounts of up to 84% on electronic prescribing systems from DrFirst Inc., Rockville, Md. Neither society will receive any financial compensation under the agreements.

Other state medical societies, including New Jersey and Ohio, have negotiated agreements under which their members can buy practice management or EMR software or medical and surgical supplies from specific vendors. As part of the agreements, the societies receive some financial compensation from the vendors.

The AMA has a similar arrangement under which its members receive a discount of up to 10% on purchases of computer hardware and handheld devices from Dell Inc., IBM Corp. and pdaMD.com.