A physician responds to his patient's questions and concerns via e-mail - and gets paid for it. He also works roughly eight-hour weekdays, has stable off-hours coverage and enough money to purchase his own electronic medical record (EMR) system.
Sounds pretty nice, right? Well, this physician is in Denmark. Nothing against the Danes, it's just far away from home in the U.S.
These sort of health information technology (HIT) advancements sounded pretty good to those attending the IBM and eHealth Initiative forum on HIT, held March 20. The Commonwealth Fund's Stephen Schoenbaum MD (sitting second from the right) relayed the anecdote about the Danish doctor during his presentation, titled "Health Information Technology: Essential for a High Performance Health System." The forum included other physicians calling for HIT advancements. The biggest complaint about HIT in the U.S. is that EMRs are not interoperable or compatible with other systems and often require lots of data entry that goes unrewarded. Physicians argued that more would purchase EMRs if they added more value to their practices.
This got me thinking: if an EMR allowed you to answer your patients' calls to the office by e-mail - and Medicare would pay you for it - would you be more inclined to use an EMR?
Subscribers can read more about the forum here, and in the next issue of Part B News.