5 EHR Myths

I’ve been debunking EHR myths for the 8+ years I’ve been blogging about EHR software. There are a lot of them. Some are perpetuated because people don’t want to change. Others were true, but aren’t true today. Others are just complete misunderstandings of the benefits and challenges of EHR Myths.

ADP AdvancedMD has put out a whitepaper called “EHR Myths Debunked: 5 Status Quo Myths that Hold You back and Reduce Your Bottom Line“. You know I couldn’t resist taking a look at such a whitepaper. I was quite pleased the it was full of a lot of numbers related to EHR.

For example, it says the cost of “creating a new chart” is $7. I imagine they’re taking into account the cost of the materials and the cost of the person creating the chart. They also look at the costs of replacing a chart, pulling or refiling a chart, faxing a chart, storing a chart, etc. I love how many doctors take these EHR benefits and sweep them under the rug. It’s really interesting to put a dollar value to them and consider how those costs add up.

In some ways, the EHR Myths whitepaper covers a lot of the areas I’ve talked about in my EMR and EHR Benefits series. It really is amazing how many EHR myths there are out there and the whitepaper looks at 5 of them that are worth analyzing. I wish the whitepaper would have also covered some of the possible negative impacts EHR can have on a practice like physician productivity. Although, most practices are really good at analyzing the negative side of EHR, so the numbers in this whitepaper will help to round out your analysis of EHR.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the myths talked about in this whitepaper. Are there other EHR myths that those in healthcare should know about? Do you agree with the 5 myths mentioned in the whitepaper?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • A fascinating piece of propaganda.

    What they are missing is that the costs they are showing for paper charts are being saved at the lowest paid employee level while increasing the work of the highest paid individual.

    For example:
    “Paper charge slips must be manually entered by billing staff.”

    They miss that this entry is currently done by low paid employees, andnow that work is being shifted to the highest paid employee.

    You have to realize that of all the people working in the MDs office, only the MD can produce revenue. That revenue must pay the salary and benefits of every employee, plus cover rent, phone bills, internet charges, malpractice insurance and all other overhead.

    The cost of paper charts is the cost of low paid FTEs. The cost of EHRs currently is the loss of billing by the only source of revenue, the MD.

    Most Docs I know are spending an extra hour or 2 each day trying to do things in the EHR.

    For round numbers, lest assume an MD must collect $500,000 in order to run a solo practice. That is not his salary. It is the cost of all employees’ salaries, benefits, overhead, etc.

    That’s $2000 per workday (250 workdays per year) or $250 per hour.

    A doc who spends 1 hour per day doing busy work in an EHR loses 250 * $250 = $62500 per year in collections. 2 hours per day (Not unusual) nets losses of $125,000 per year. That is in addition to the cost of IT and the cost of licensing the EHR.

    Getting rid of 1 FTE ($30,000 or 40,000 per year) does not really make that up.

    Overall, this white paper of myths is a nice piece of mythology itself.

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories