Study Reveals EMR Challenges for "Doc-Owners"

According to a recent report in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association, physician “owners” of electronic health records find the adoption to be “more taxing”. A survey conducted by Partners Healthcare in Boston of more than 150 physicians included in the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative pilot concluded that physicians who owned their own practice needed more help to implement an EMR than physicians whose practices were owned or sponsored by another healthcare entity or system.

Makes sense, right? 

So-called “mom-and-pop” practices may have less access to capital and IT professional staff, with an overall clinical operation that fits their individual style of practice. The study results showed that more than half of the respondents found the implementation to be “somewhat difficult”, and another 35% found it to be “extremely difficult”. When looking at ownership, the study results showed that less than a quarter of the respondents found it to “extremely difficult” if they had no ownership interest in the practice. That result jumped to over 38% with a partial or total ownership interest. The perception of the costs of the EMR system (capital, start-up, implementation, decreased productivity) were given as the reason for this discrepancy.

The study further revealed that “because ownership is generally associated with greater levels of responsibility for day-to-day practice operations and management, these physicians probably experienced more underlying challenges associated with EHR implementation and workflow transformation". The study also found that "physician owners probably bear financial risk for failure of implementation out of proportion to payers or publicly-funded health plans who benefit from patient safety and quality but not as directly from practice efficiency or revenue cycle management."