Patient Medical Record Software

Illinois clinics working to fund electronic medical records in rural areas

HILLSBORO -- McFarlin Medical Clinic, with one doctor and 10 employees, can’t afford to convert from paper medical records to electronic versions.

But the Hillsboro practice could benefit from an Illinois-based effort to change federal law and make millions of dollars in federal incentive payments available to rural health clinics.

“We don’t have a lot of cash on hand to make a major investment like electronic medical records,” said Doris McFarlin, who manages the office of her husband, family medicine specialist Dr. Roger McFarlin.

Some financial assistance, however, would make the conversion “a whole lot easier,” she said.

A Quincy-based group of medical clinics is spearheading an effort to get Congress to change a section of the 2009 economic stimulus law that makes up to $27 billion in incentive payments available to doctors and hospitals over the next 10 years to adopt electronic medical records.

The Quincy Medical Group operates rural health clinics in Quincy and elsewhere, including Winchester, Pittsfield, Barry, Pleasant Hill and Mount Sterling.

Electronic Medical Records Software

It takes a considerably amount of time for a nurse at a hospital to retrieve a patient's charts that were misplaced, fill out forms, and decipher a doctor's scribbled notes. Another problem was the pneumatic tube system that was used to provide documents such as orders between the floors of the hospital. Sometimes the nurse couldn't find the patient's charts at all and the pneumatic tube system was either down or got stuck.

There is an effort all over the US to computerize hospitals. However, these hospitals are facing a dilemma that is very common which is the need for information technology (IT) to replace the paper records, but don't have sufficient funds to pay for it. The easiest and most inexpensive way to do this is by using the software that to powers the electronic medical record system (EMRs) of the Veterans Administration (VA).

This EMR system was created in 20 years with many billions of dollars of taxpayer's money and used in over 1,400 VA facilities. The software's source code is in the public domain which means that the developers of the software all over the world can use it freely. When you add in cost of the services of a company that can adapt the VA's software for commercial use and the hardware, and any hospital can end up paying less than $7,000,000 for a full EMR system.

Although this free software that was created by the VA still costs money to install and maintain, it's frequently less expensive than the software that can be provided by from private vendors. However, because there are numerous obstacles that threaten the adoption of EMRs, that could improve patient care and reduce costs, there are still a very low number of hospitals that have embraced them. Although the initial costs may be hefty, in the long run, EMRs will reduce costs.

Technologies that are paperless revolutionized the retailing and banking industries. However, even after a 10 year effort to modernize health care, less than 2 percent of the country's 5,000 private hospitals have an EMR system. The reason for this is that the hospitals can't afford the cost of the EMR systems, which cost somewhere between $20,000,000 and $100,000,000 and the downturn if the economy isn't helping.

The federal government has offered $20,000,000,000 in an effort to make EMRs more affordable by 2011. In addition, by 2015 the federal government will penalize the hospitals that don't use EMRS by cutting a percentage of their Medicare payments.

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