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I don't know if any of you have had a chance to look at the electronic health records (EHR) portion of the stimulus bill (see above link), but for solution providers out there I'd take a look and start sharpening your healthcare practices because there's gold in them thar hills.
Putting aside the question of whether hospitals are a business needing a stimulus (judging from the bills the last time a family member was there, seems hard to believe), the money that hospitals will receive sure will change the economics of EHR implementations.
Now I'm not a lawyer (I just play one on TV), but there seem to be two components to the payments: 1) a base payment of $2 million; and 2) a floating payment of up to $4.6 million based on the number of annual patient discharges, which I would imagine is somehow designed to reflect hospital size. And that's only for year one. In years 2, 3, and 4 the payments will be 75%, 50%, and 25% of this amount. So taking a hospital maybe in the middle that might get the $2M base and a $2M floating discharge-based payment in year one, it would appear that the "incentive" for implementing EHR would be a total of $10 million over 4 years. Hey, that can buy one heck of an ECM system.
Turning to individual practices, the amounts for each provider (doctor, dentist, nurse practitioner) start at $15K per provider during year one, dropping to $12K, $8K, $4K and $2K for each of the next 4 years. So let's take a practice with 4 doctors and a nurse practitioner. That would mean total incentive payments of $205K to a 5-professional medical practice over 5 years. Not bad! That's a lot of scanners and software. sure does change the economics of those files with the pretty colors on the top.
So my two questions to the world out there ...
- Do I have this right? and
- If I do and you're a solution provider, what's keeping you from beefing up your medical records practice RIGHT NOW?
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