BUSINESS

Doctors offer views on EMR implementation

The annual survey also reported that more physicians feel outside pressure to adopt electronic medical records.

By Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews staff. Nov. 12, 2007.

Some barriers to electronic medical record implementation are lessening for physicians, according to the Medical Records Institute's annual "Survey of Electronic Medical Records Trends and Usage." The percentage of doctors who reported funding and resource barriers to purchasing EMRs decreased, as did the percentage reporting lack of support from staff or partners.

Meanwhile, real or perceived pressure of employers, insurers and the government to install EMRs is being felt. The percentage of practices reporting that such pressure drove their decision to get an EMR tripled since last year, from 6.9% to 19.9%.

Why you need an EMR, what's stopping you
Topic: Electronic medical records
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After vendor and consultant responses were removed to reduce survey bias, there were 729 respondents to the survey in 2006 and 819 in 2007. The institute is an organization that promotes technology use in health care.

More than 90% of the 2007 respondents said they anticipate that EMRs will have improved patient safety and quality of care 10 years from now. More than half said quality of care, patient safety and efficiency in delivery of care have already improved due to EMRs. However, the survey was limited to physicians who are installing or have installed EMRs and did not measure the overall percentage of practices that are using EMRs, a number usually reported to be around 20%.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Why you need an EMR, what's stopping you

Lack of funding and lack of resources remain the chief barrier to implementation, say physicians who have installed or are installing EMRs.

	2006	2007
Advantages
Improved patient documentation	Not asked	81.2%
Improved workflow efficiencies	81.7%	73.1%
Remote access to patient records	Not asked	72.1%
Improved coding and charge capture	60.0%	64.2%
Point-of-care access and transmission of patient data	Not asked	63.2%
Patient and physician satisfaction	52.6%	61.5%
Decision support and clinical guidelines	Not asked	52.6%
Easier reporting (e.g., government, payers)	Not asked	50.1%
Increased revenues	not asked	44.9%
Computer and Internet support for decision-making	Not asked	37.5%
Expanding medical community with links to hospitals, other services	Not asked	33.3%
Value-based purchasing/pay-for-performance	33.0%	33.1%
Improved competitiveness	44.4%	30.4%
Pressure from government, insurers	6.9%	19.9%
Possibility of subsidized purchase	15.8%	19.5%
Barriers
Lack of adequate funding or resources	55.5%	40.4%
Anticipated difficulties in changing to an EMR system	Option not offered	30.9%
Difficulty in creating migration plan from paper	22.9%	29.3%
Inability to find an EMR solution or components at an affordable cost	29.4%	29.1%
Difficulty justifying the investment	21.0%	23.7%
Unable to find EMR that meets needs	23.6%	21.1%
Difficulty finding an EMR that is not fragmented among vendors or IT platforms	23.2%	19.0%
Lack of support by medical staff or partners	31.7%	18.8%
Difficulty evaluating EMR solutions or components	23.6%	18.5%