White House Urges Doctors To Use Electronic Health Records

White House Urges Doctors To Use Electronic Health Records in General Healthcare

The Bush Administration set a goal to get the nation’s health care providers to adopt electronic health records by 2014. Now, the White House is offering increased Medicare reimbursements for physicians who move their practice online. They're recruiting 1,200 doctors to make the switch to electronic records.

Physicians can receive higher payments based on their annual evaluation scores and how aggressively they implement electronic records, reported RedOrbit. The White House has also asked insurance companies to increase reimbursements for health care providers who use electronic records.

Experts say that using electronic health records can help slow the rising health care costs in the U.S — it will increase business efficiency, lower administrative costs, and reduce medical errors. But the cost for a practice to move online can be high — installing an electronic computer system can cost as much as $40,000.

“It [also] takes a long time to convert. At the beginning, it’s very, very slow and it interferes with your work flow,” said Dr. Joseph Heyman, a physician from Massachusetts.

In the long run, though, it seems that electronic health records will make the delivery of health care much easier and more convenient. These days, we forget how we ever survived without the Internet in our daily lives. It’s safe bet that once health care providers go online, they’ll eventually forget, too.

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