NYC Offering Subsidies To Push Electronic Medical Records

If there's one thing most everyone with an interest in health care IT can agree on—be he John Q. Patient or President-Elect Barack Obama—it's that electronic medical records (EMR) are the wave of the future. But many doctor's offices, especially small ones, continue to regard EMRs as an ideal with a prohibitive price tag.

Hoping to bring that ideal closer to reality, New York City has in the past year mounted an ambitious public health project that offers subsidies to small practices that adopt a standard EMR. According to a Tuesday report in The New York Times, city physician practices that count at least 10 percent of their patients as being on Medicaid or being uninsured see their costs, after subsidies, lowered to about $24,000, and some practices in poorer areas of the city—including the South Bronx, central Brooklyn and Harlem—go as low as $10,000. The program has thus far signed up about 1,000 primary care physicians and is said to have recruited another 500.

In return for participating in the program, which according to the Times costs New York City $60 million, physicians agree to provide information about the success of their preventative care so that the city can compare practices against one another.

In April 2009, the participating doctors will begin to receive city-issued report cards on how they compare to their peers. Only participating doctors, not practices, receive the report cards, which are unavailable to the public.

New York's EMR program was designed by eClinicalWorks, a software company and provider of EMR and practice management solutions based in Westborough, Mass.

"We know that at these fancy schmancy systems, they can do these things," said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner for the primary care information project for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, to the Times. "But here in New York, we're trying to do this for the storefront in Harlem. As of now, about 2 percent of solo and small practices have electronic health records. This is really hard stuff to do. We have boots on the ground."

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told conference attendees at Everything Channel's Healthcare IT Summit in November that 2008 would be remembered as a "tipping point" year for healthcare IT, and that one of the drivers would be the continued ramp-up in EMR implementations. According to International Data Corp., EMRs represent a market growing 15 percent a year and expected to hit $4.85 billion by 2015. President-Elect Obama announced plans during his presidential campaign to invest $50 billion in EMR over five years.

Greater and more effective EMR implementations will, of course, mean big opportunities for solution providers, who have told ChannelWeb often in the past year that the time to get in on EMR is yesterday.

"If you're not into [EHR] within the next two to three years, you're really going to be too late," said C.J. Ezell, president of The ASI Group, a Mobile, Ala.-based solution provider.

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