EHRs May Not Be Good Fit for All Psychiatry Practices
Abstract
EHRs May Not Be Good Fit for All Psychiatry PracticesRich Daly Psychiatrists with large percentages of Medicare or Medicaid patients are expected to benefit most from federal incentives to adopt electronic records. Penalties could eventually be imposed on clinicians who accept private insurance and lack such a system. Psychiatrists assessing their interest in the huge $19 billion federal program that aims to entice clinicians and hospitals into adopting expensive digital patient record systems should first ask themselves the following questions: Do I treat many Medicare patients? Is a large segment of my patient population enrolled in Medicaid? Is a large part of my practice writing prescriptions for psychoactive medications? Psychiatrists who answered “no” to all three of those questions should approach the federal incentive program with caution, according to psychiatric experts on the information systems that federal regulators refer to as electronic health records (EHRs). “The clinicians this [incentive program] impacts the most are people who see a lot of Medicare or Medicaid patients,” said Robert Plovnick, M.D., M.S., director of the APA Department of Quality Improvement and Psychiatric Services, in an interview with Psychiatric News. Beginning in 2011, the federal EHR incentive program will provide up to