Only 28 percent of U.S. doctors and 23 percent of Canadian doctors said they used electronic medical records (EMRs), compared with overwhelming majorities of doctors in the Netherlands (98%), New Zealand (92%), the U.K. (89%), and Australia (79%).
US physicians are mandated to EMR within a few years. But the reasons the migration hass are simple --
a) Most older physicians DO NOT WANT EMR. We get interest in EMR from new med school graduates, but older docs just prefer their tried-and-true methods;
b) At this point, the cost of a good EMR system is still $25,000, which the typical small practice isn't going to buy.
c) Low-cost EMR technology is still very lousy.
d) The EMR mandate was part of HIPAA, which imposes onerous requirements that we'd be better off without, e.g., paperwork that serves no purposes whatsoever. Thank Clinton.
e) The standards for these databases and interchange of data have only recently evolved to a point where they really start to make sense. Whether these other countries have any standards in place is subject to question. What will happen if a patient visiting Europe needs images from a US Provider? The good news is that the American standard is THE standard and will always be.
Once again, it depends on the question -- "Are you using EMR?" -- that can mean simply typing of dictation into a custom form of word processor to some offices, but the extended EMR systems that are paperless, permit storage, retrieval, and transmission of high-res images, etc., -- these are far more complex systems.
As a practical matter, it is much easier to implement EMR for a healthcare system that has only one "clinic" with thousands of offices, versus the US system of each clinic being an independent entity. This does NOT, however, suggest in any way that government run health care is "better" than private enterprise. |
