Many health care facilities and physicians have serious concerns about the proposed regulation, and they're hoping the final version that emerges after the public comment period will be significantly different.

According to Angela K. Dinh, manager, professional practice resources for the American Health Information Management Association, health professionals need to stay on top of legislation because there are a lot of rules and regulations that will be coming out in the months ahead.


Importance of EHR/EMR

The ultimate endpoint for having such a system in place allows not only for people who relocate to other parts of the world to be able to have their medical records, but also more commonly allows for records to be sent from one system to another in the same geographical area.

"If you are seen in a doctor's office, once in a great while you will have to be admitted to a hospital, but if they have a system that is completely different from the doctor's system, there isn't an easy way to look at all the rich information the doctor has accumulated," Beck explains. "It is theoretically possible for the systems to communicate with one another via certain standards so the computers and software can talk to one another using similar language."

The benefits of having a nationwide EHR/EMR connectivity system are many, with some positives probably not even realized yet.

"One of the major priorities is to get people sharing information," says Dr. Michael Stearns, president of Austin, Texas-based e-MDs. "What most physicians have known for decades is if we've had enough data in records, we could do a lot more with helping patients and there's a lot of cost advantages as well."

For example, there are a lot of therapies in medicine that may be causing harm. Stearns tells the story of one medication released after clinical trials where after a few years some patients started dying of heart disease.

"No one suspected the cause, but it took about four years before we got enough data to determine it was indeed causing heart disease," he says. "With EHRs, people could share data and we may have gotten enough information in a month. We feel there are a lot of other situations out there where we could see what's causing harm or what's beneficial."

The industry talks about historical value proposition, and that essentially means that the ERH/EMR system is designed to be beneficial in many ways.

"There's a reduction of transcription cost, the improvement of productivity for the staff, reduced cost for the pharmacy, reduced time and money spent on looking for paper charts, filing paper charts, the coding improvements and revenue gains that come from having an electronic help to doing your documentation," says David Henriksen, senior vice president and general manager of McKesson's Physician Practice Solutions. "In today's environment, not only do you get that, but the prescribing incentives are in place now with the stimulus to put the final touches on trying to make money not an issue on physician adoption."

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