Services pop up to help doctors pick EMR system

Medical societies and others are trying to help physicians select electronic medical records systems that suit their practices.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Nov. 8, 2004.

With an estimated 200 to 400 companies selling electronic medical records software, physicians interested in buying a system need help. So medical societies, industry groups, consultants and others are getting in the business of advising physicians on what EMR would suit them best.

"Doctors, particularly doctors in small to medium-size practices, don't have the resources on their own to make good decisions between the hundreds of vendors. So, the need for this activity is certainly out there," said Peter Basch, MD, an internist and co-chair of Physicians' Electronic Health Record Coalition.

PEHRC was formed in July by 14 medical societies -- including the AMA, American College of Physicians and American Academy of Family Physicians -- to help physicians choose and implement EMRs, which also are called EHRs, or electronic health records.

"I doubt that we as the PEHRC will recommend specific EHRs," Dr. Basch said.

Members of the coalition, which hopes to release its recommendations within 12 months, plan to discuss, among other things, whether to propose that individual specialty medical societies collect and make physician reviews of EMRs available to their members in a sort of Consumer Reports format, Dr. Basch said. That way, physicians can find out what products peers within their medical specialty have found useful, he said.

Three nonprofit industry groups -- the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, the American Health Information Management Assn. and the National Alliance for Health Information Technology -- also have an EMR program underway. The entities are sponsoring an effort to develop voluntary certification standards to make it easier for physicians to compare and evaluate different EMR systems.