I previously wrote about the reasons EHR companies use to get you to buy an EHR Now. Today I came across a post that’s really similar to my idea. The post is by Evan Steele, CEO SRSsoft and it’s entitled “From EMR Vendors: Fact or Fiction?” I think that Evan does a really good job covering some of the misconceptions/lies that are being spread by overzealous EHR salespeople in regards to the HITECH act’s EHR stimulus money. My favorite one was this:
“You must act now—buy an EHR now because in order to get the money from the government, you must be using the EMR by 2011.” As with used-car salesmen, “buy now” is always popular, but you actually have until 2013 to implement and potentially qualify for the lion’s share of the incentives.
Even if you do not implement until 2014 (5 years from now), you would still be eligible for almost 80% of the money.
Yes, it indeed sounds like a total sales catch line. Although, you are incorrect with your implementation to stimulus ratio. If we are not showing “meaningful use” during 2014 – this means being implemented and training and using the system, we will be getting Medicare reductions. The first 2 years (for 44K Medicare re-imbursement there are 5 payments) is nearly 70% of the total re-imbursement. They are scaled as such: 18K-1st year, 12K-2nd year, 8K-3rd year, 4K-4th year, and 2K-5th year. So, yes we can wait but WE WILL miss out on the lions share of the stimulus.
You’re wrong about that. I haven’t calculated the 80% myself, but it’s pretty close. Check out the third slide of this presentation to see the chart of payments: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2009/07/16/ehr-stimulus-arra-presentation-in-austin-texas/ You’ll still get the lions share of the money even if you wait a couple years. You lose none for 2012 EHR adoption. $5k for 2013 EHR adoption. 9k for 2014 EHR adoption.
Pitch or no Pitch, I am a huge fan of acting now when it comes to establishing a positive cash flow for your business. After all who knows when the money is going to run out so I recommend to all my clients, simply use good business logic, made sound decisions that bring about a positive cash flow as early as possible. You can listen to Dr. Jewell tell his story here… http://www.xlemr.com/content/110610_Jewell_Interview.mp3
Tripp,
Interesting little “podcast” Any way to embed that?
Hey John,
Please don’t take this the wrong way but were would you suggest I embed the pod cast? 😉
Tripp,
If you have an embed code, then bloggers like myself and others can embed the podcast on our site. Certainly we could just link to the mp3, but that doesn’t make for as good of a user experience as an embed code does.
See if this works as an embedded podcast.
We also put it on this page with an embedded player.
http://www.xlemr.com/reimbursements.html