Is Your Electronic Medical Record Ready for Medicare ACO's?

Never ask this question at a party with private practice physical therapist clinic owners:

"So, what's the ROI on your EMR?"

Chances are the party-like mood will end and you'll be left alone, staring at your drink, wondering what happened.

Electronic Medical Records never did promise much return even under traditional Fee-For-Service. Now, under new Medicare ACO's these old models promise to return even less.

A new report called Better to Best: Value Driving Elements of the Patient Centered Medical Home and Accountable Care Organizations calls into question the current versions of your Electronic Medical Records (EMR).

The report from the Commonwealth Fund, the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative is a consensus statement from a meeting that took place September 8th, 2010.

Today's health IT...

"...was developed to support a traditional fee-for-service, visit-based reimbursement model, with the focus on documentation requirements to support a billing function,"

according to David Nace, MD, a McKesson executive quoted in the report."

"Health IT requires new functional capabilities, such as the following:

• multiple team member access and permissions 
• care management workflow support 
• integrated personal health records
• registry functionalities
• clinical decision support
• measurement of quality and efficiency
• robust reporting.

 An interconnected health IT network with key capabilities that optimize engagement, coordinate care and support the implementation of value-based payments is required to support Patient Centered Medical Home (practice) and Accountable Care Organization (enterprise) practice transformation."

For a look at a free, functioning version of a Clinical Decision Support system I've been using in my clinic since 2006 to improve quality, such as PQRS, and guarantee Medicare compliance go to BulletproofPT.com.