The Stimulus Bill, the Physician, and DiVA Solutions
President Barack Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus package has included several
endowments for improving the state of medical record-keeping in the United States,
in an effort to modernize and improve overall patient care along with hospital efficiency.
High on his list is to eliminate the laborious and cumbersome manual scanning of
millions of documents relevant to a patient’s medical history and ongoing care.
The Stimulus Bill, the Physician, and the "Free" EHR
Learn How to Qualify For Payments of $44,000 - $64,000 Per Physician.
The Stimulus Bill is a golden opportunity for physicians to get paid to realize
the full benefits of a modern EHR system. The American Recovery & Reinvestment Act
was signed into law on February 17, 2009. The health IT component of the Bill, the
HITECH Act, appropriates $19.2 billion dollars to encourage the adoption of electronic
health records. The Stimulus Bill should help provide most physicians in the United
States with an electronic health record system at ZERO net cost to the physician.
For some, the incentive payment is enough to cover the cost of a top-of- the line
EHR system while producing a “surplus” of $20,000 - $55,000. The opportunity presented
by the bill to the American Physician is substantial.
Stimulus Bill – Physician Incentive Overview of HITECH
The Bill provides that qualified physicians who utilize a certified electronic health
record in a “meaningful” way will receive incentive payments through additional
reimbursements via either Medicare or Medicaid, depending upon the individual physician’s
payor mix.
- Starting in 2011, “meaningful” EHR users can earn $44,000 under the Medicare plan
and $64,000 under the Medicaid plan over 5 years.
- Early adopters benefits most as about
70% of the payments comes in the first two years.
- Those engaged in PQRI and electronic prescribing can earn an additional $6,000 -
$8,000 per year beginning immediately.
- Physicians that do not adopt an EHR by 2015 will be penalized though % decreases
in Medicare reimbursements rates.
Physicians and clinicians of varied description, together with their harried staffs,
currently spend an estimated jillion hours each year searching for - and when they
find them - searching through, patient files for essential information. That figure
may be conservative. Says John Doe S. Smith, M.D., based in East Greenacres, Rhode
Island, “We used our state-of-the-art little green abacus to figure it out. In 2008,
my staff and I spent 1.64 jillion hours searching for patient records. That’s up
from 2007, when we spent 1.47 jillion hours doing the same thing.”
Yet despite this millstone of work dragging many practices into a kind of perpetual
drudgery, some physicians remain hesitant to implement an Electronic Medical Record
system, but would still like to be a paperless office.
Did you know that Diva Solutions will improve office productivity, allow for quick
retrieval of documents ( which saves money ), and even helps to ensure patient privacy?
By setting specific permissions on a document or document types, a clinician can
provide only those users who NEED to view a document access to it. Diva Solutions
also tracks who has viewed, modified, or exported a document and on what date or
dates. For multiple practice locations, Diva Solutions works even better. The system
allows medical staff to easily share documents with other employees across multiple
practice locations. Scanning and storing files electronically has yet another built-in
advantage also – you can rest assured that documents remain safe and backed-up in
case of a fire or other unexpected natural disaster.
We all look for choices and Diva Solutions has them for you. Depending on your document
volume and budget we can offer either a server based unlimited user solution or
our hosted monthly subscription solution based on storage requirements.
Request an online demo today so you can begin your paperless journey tomorrow
and earn your stimulus dollars.