Hospital Subsidies Are Off to a Slow Start with Electronic Health Records

Congress had paved the way with relaxed Stark rules and regulations for subsidies to take place from the hospital level, but what's still wrong with this picture? It all comes right back around to money. Hospitals are not in a position to spend the money either, so now where do we go? One answer has been the ASP model offered by some hospitals, whereby they enter information directly through a portal with data houses maintained by the hospital, but these also have some shortcomings in the fact that hospital and office records do vary a bit and it may not always be a good fit, but I would guess something is better than nothing.

As mentioned in a early post though, some hospitals are not even at the point of providing any additional services if they are teetering on being insolvent.

On the other hand some hospitals are being very inventive and working to bring integration to light between themselves, such as this story relates with Kaiser (Epic records) and St. Joseph’s Hospital in Denver working together and it was not an easy task. The Kaiser EHR system is set up to work with both the hospital and ambulatory end of things, so that was a help from the start. The integration has enabled radiologists to read the image, dictate using voice recognition technology from Nuance Communications. Part of their success here was the use of a 3rd party integrator, as internal IT/IS Departments don't have the staff nor the budgets to bring this all together, and their input to the 3rd party integrator had to be much easier to supply rather than to have to start from scratch to write the book. BD

Federal action that paved the way for hospitals to subsidize a portion of the cost of electronic health records for physicians has yet to trigger a surge of automation interest among physicians, some observers say. And some providers offering deep discounts on EHRs to community physicians have been disappointed by the response so far.

Mt. Carmel Health System in Columbus, Ohio, recently began offering to pay 50% of the cost involved for community physicians to access EHRs from NextGen Healthcare Information Systems Inc., Horsham, Pa., via the application service provider computing model. So far, only eight physicians are participating, says Doug Blair, Mt. Carmel’s senior director of physician information systems. Similarly, only five small practices so far have taken advantage of discounted ASP access to electronic records through Wellspan Health, a York, Pa.-based delivery system, says Mark Jacobs, director of technology services.

Subsidies Are Off to a Slow Start