John Moore recently wrote a great article on whether the government has set EHR goals too high. The government plans to spend an estimated $36.3 million on physician adoption of Electronic Medical Records in the next several years. Phase I is slated to begin in 2011, with the goal of capture and sharing of data.

In order to gain buy-in from the small/individual practices, the government is going to need to be much more transparent in defining “meaningful use”. The Center for Medicaid/Medicare Services has outline these 5 broad categories in its goal of defining “meaningful use”:

1. Improve quality, safety, efficiency and reduce health disparities.
2. Engage patients and families.
3. Improve care coordination.
4. Improve population and public health.
5. Insure adequate privacy and security protections for personal health information.

In the end, the thing that will lead to physician adoption of EHRs is utility. Will the implementation and maintenance costs of EHRs lead to improved workflow and rapid patient throughput. Outsourced administrative services are growing every day. Physicians are finding it cost effective to outsource medical billing, transcription, and many other services, rather than hiring an in-house staff.

In these small practices, that make up 75% of patient care, EHRs have yet to prove themselves as a benefit. There needs to be more incentive and better utility if we expect small practices to pick up these services.