Desk-side assistance: Hiring an IT consultant

Small group practices are slowly discovering what many large groups already know: There is value in retaining independent companies for tech support. Companies are responding and adjusting their target audiences.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Aug. 14, 2006.

Stasia Kahn, MD, and her two partners knew they wanted their internal medicine group to be a paperless practice right out of the chute. So, much like a big hospital system, they hired a health care technology services company to help them evaluate electronic medical records software systems.

The Winfield, Ill.-based practice bought a system from NextGen Healthcare Information Systems Inc., on the advice of E-Medapps, Schaumburg, Ill. Then, without hesitation, the three physician partners agreed to pay $1,900 a month to E-Medapps for tech support.

"If you really want to make [an EMR] work, be totally paperless and have the whole practice using it, you have to commit that you're going to be able to fix problems immediately," Dr. Kahn said. "The cost of doing business and being completely electronic requires [hiring] an information technology consultant, because otherwise your practice processes are interrupted every time there's a glitch."

Plenty of other practices have reached the same conclusion. Most of these, however, tend to be large groups that can afford to hire in-house staff or contract with vendors to support their systems. That's why health care technology consulting and services companies usually market to large groups, rather than smaller ones that often are reluctant to spend money on information technology.

"In the small-office market, there's often a doctor who has a little bit of technical knowledge, and he's the guy who kind of put the network together and he keeps on saying, 'Well, if I can do it, why should I pay someone?' " said Rosemarie Nelson, a senior consultant for the Medical Group Management Assn.