CMS takes baby step toward national network

The government is testing an electronic medical record based on a system used by the VA. The system will not be free to doctors.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Oct. 10, 2005.

The grand plans of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to create a national health information network will soon be off to a humble start. CMS plans to recruit five to 10 small group practices to test what it hopes will become a widely used electronic medical record. However, if physicians were hoping to get a free system from the CMS, they're out of luck. Even those participating in the test will have to pay.

The select group of practices will take a year-long test drive of the VistA-Office Electronic Health Record software, which is a modification of the EMR that U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs hospitals have used for 20 years. CMS says that after a post-test evaluation of undetermined length, it would release a full production version of the software.

The VistA-Office EHR software itself is only $37, but those test practices will be required to pay $2,740 in licensing and maintenance fees. For any practice with more than seven users for that software -- a user being anybody, physician or otherwise, who uses the system -- that price will go higher, though CMS didn't say how much.

Those costs, while lower than most EMRs on the market, are giving some physicians pause.

"It's going to be hard for someone to just volunteer and go ahead and implement this for evaluation if they have to spend this much just to get it up and running," said Steven E. Waldren, MD, assistant director of the Center for Health Information Technology at the American Academy of Family Physicians.