Practice Technology

The pace of EHR implementation has been excruciatingly slow.

Here's one more reason why the feds are pushing for a nationwide health information network--the ability to scour millions of electronic records and catch unexpected drug side effects as soon as possible.

A new study from the AC Group identifies seven EHR vendors that give you the most digital bang for your buck.

First, give physicians incentives to adopt EHRs. Then make their use compulsory. It's a game plan from an offshoot of the National Governors Association for promoting digital medicine on a state level.

Two recent studies suggest that many healthcare providers weren't ready when the May 23 deadline came to submit insurance claims with only the new National Provider Identifier. What's at stake is millions if not billions of dollars in rejected claims.

Cue the drum roll-every last one of the 8.7 million enrollees of Kaiser Permanente finally has an outpatient EHR. It’s the latest milestone of a $4 billion IT project that suggests how much it might cost to digitize the entire nation’s healthcare system.

If you want to copy the habits of financially successful doctors who don't have to borrow money to meet payroll, consider implementing an EHR. That's one conclusion you could draw from survey data from the Medical Group Management Association.

The nationwide network of EHRs that the feds are building will include various PHRs on the market, and possibly those from Google and Microsoft.

Certified EHRs are supposed to be the best, and the kind the feds want you to buy, but the number of programs attaining this status has tailed off big-time.

The US healthcare system could save lives if it possessed an early warning system for new drugs with unexpected side effects instead of waiting for complaints to roll into the FDA. Our friends across the Atlantic are developing such a system using EHRs.

Massachusetts lawmakers want to make getting a medical license hinge on a clinician's ability to use an EHR by 2015. Physicians there have mixed feelings about the plan.

Certifying EHRs is supposed to help doctors pick the best products. But small medical practices generally don't put much stock in this stamp of approval, according to KLAS, a firm that researches healthcare information technology.

The case of entertainer Britney Spears and her peeked-at digital chart illustrates the value of an EHR audit trail.

Facial recognition software can speed up logging into your office network and individual programs.

Your choice of EHRs is slowly narrowing down as the number of vendors shrinks. That makes shopping easier.

Take these precautions with Web-based EHRs.

You've got key decisions to make when choosing the right system for your office. Here's help.

Everybody wants to know if their EHR vendor will be around five years from now. Well, the finances of publicly traded vendors are an open book. In the last quarter of 2007, most of them rolled in dough, but one lost money.

Hospitals have a federal green light to help you pay for an EHR, but one little restriction could limit the number of programs eligible for a discount.

You're under growing pressure to e-prescribe, but how do you get started? An interactive website co-sponsored by organized medicine walks you through the steps.

Provider organizations looking to buy an ambulatory electronic health record give the most consideration to products from eClinicalWorks, NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, and Allscripts, according to IT research firm KLAS Enterprises.

It's not yet the norm, but one more malpractice carrier is lowering premiums for doctors who use EHRs.

The office that President Bush created to promote interoperable EHRs has received $200 million since 2004, but still hasn't produced a meaningful strategy to attain its goal, according to the General Accountability Office. But a plan is supposedly in the works.

An EHR system can cost anywhere from $11,000 to $96,000 per doctor over three years, reports the AC Group. It all depends on the degree of sophistication you want.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, EHRs could reduce the quality of care and increase costs, says a pioneer in healthcare information technology.

With an EHR, doctors no longer have to worry about long-term off-site storage of thousands of paper charts. Is storage as simple as backing up the records onto discs or cartridges and keeping them in a bank vault?

Hospitals can help you buy this software

Here's how to dissect EHR bids to make sure you're getting the best deal.

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