This article from CNN Money talks about the Obama stimulus plan and the huge expense of training the labor force to implement a computerized health infrastructure.
$100 billion of the $800 billion Obama stimulus plan is proposed to be spent on making all health records standard and electronic by 2014.
17% of physicians and physical therapists now use electronic medical records. 8% of all hospitals use them.
We started a new electronic medical records system last week at Medical Arts Rehabilitation, Inc. in Manatee County, Florida.
Costs have really come down.
The first system I priced two years ago was $60,000 and I would have had to buy two servers to host it all.
The system I bought in December 2008 cost $4,800 and we are up and running in two weeks. It's called Clinic Controller by A2C Medical.
I'll blog my results regularly to keep the physical therapy community updated on our efforts.
We set it up ourselves (I paid an IT guy 2 thousand to configure the system and set the backups - I think I overpaid).
Now, I'm building templates of my
- Evaluation
- Progress Notes
- Daily Notes
- Re-certification Notes
- Superbill
- Patient schedule/calendar
I'm sure I haven't seen the glitches yet or the workarounds that inevitably come with any mechanical device but we're better off than we were with our old DOS-based system (yes, DOS).
We are running both systems in tandem for the time being.
Today, we shut down the old scheduling system but we still have to collect money and post accounts to the old system, probably for three-to-six more months.
I wont see any increase in revenue by switching but I guess I'm getting ready for the new health care infrastructure from the Obama administration.
I figure we'll have our new computers running smoothly before Obama has fixed the health care system.
