In an earlier post, I mentioned that my local member of the House of Representatives in DC has put forth some legislation (H.R. 4641, otherwise known as ADOPT HIT act) to encourage physician’s to adopt electronic medical records into their practice.

On Rep. Gingrey’s site, he is once again stumping for increasing the tax breaks for physicians who implement electronic medical records. Backing him up on this is is a new Commonwealth Fund study on physician investment in health IT that was published April 10th in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The data for the Commonwealth Study was collected in 2003— 3 years ago. Most will agree that probably since then there has been significant changes in physician’s use of the internet. Despite that, I think there are some very interesting findings from this research.

In 2003:

  • 16% of primary care physicians communicated with patients via e-mail
  • 25% of primary care physicians report useing EMRs
  • an additional 25% of primary care doctors said that they are considering implementation of EMRs in the next year
  • the major barriers to adoption of EHR are knowledge, training and cost

    • It would appear that Rep. Gingrey’s ADOPT HIT is directly trying to off- set some of the costs associated with the basic investment in the infrastructure (equipment and software) for Health IT systems. Notably, I did not see any allowance for training in the summaries of the ADOPT HIT act that I’ve run across.

    While I think the tax breaks are wonderful, it is important to note, that physicians will not be getting the items for free. They will still have to invest quite a good sum out of their pockets.

    I’m wondering if there will be enough left over for training the staff to use it properly? Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for a handout. However, I think a plan needs to be made. Training in a small to mid-size office often is a triple cost endeavor. You have to pay the person for the time they are in training. You have to pay for the the time of the person who will cover their job while they are training. Then you have to pay the trainer.

    I would surely hate for people to sink large sums of money into a technology that they do not use because they cannot afford to train the staff.

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