Physicians sought in electronic health records program

• By TED GRIGGS
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Oct 9, 2008 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Efforts to recruit 200 primary-care physician practices for a federally funded electronic health records demonstration project have been hampered by two hurricanes, but officials hope to meet the goal by the Nov. 26 deadline.

“There have been some applications in, but certainly we need a lot more,” said Will Jackson, project manager for the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum. “We haven’t crossed 50 applications coming in yet.”

The forum, a nonprofit group set up and funded by the state Legislature, began accepting applications from providers in early September. The quality forum serves as the community partner of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on the project.

CMS officials have said the idea behind the project is to encourage primary-care physicians to use electronic health records to improve the quality of patient care.

Alan Levine, secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals, said the program could bring up to $29 million to physician practices that use or buy Electronic Medical Record systems.

Although the hurricanes delayed the recruitment efforts, the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum’s efforts have helped Louisiana keep up with other states in the initial demonstration phase, Levine said.

According to CMS reports, Louisiana has submitted 14 applications. Maryland/Washing-ton D.C. has submitted 20, Pennsylvania 15 and South Dakota eight, Levine said.

“Physician use of HIT is critical to bringing transparency, evidenced-based decision making and efficiency to health care,” Levine said.

However, adopting the records can be costly. Some practices have spent as much as $50,000 per physician to implement the systems. In 2007, the Louisiana State Medical Society surveyed its members and found that 24 percent of those responding had converted to electronic health records or paperless recordkeeping systems.

While larger practices and hospitals have the resources to make the investments, many smaller practices that want to lack the money to do so, Levine said. The demonstration program, along with the governor’s commitment and investment in health IT, can help smaller practices offset some of those costs.

In order to apply for the demonstration program, a practice must provide primary care services for at least 50 Medicare beneficiaries that are covered under the traditional fee-for-service program.

The electronic health records demonstration will reimburse up to 100 primary care physician practices up to $290,000 over five years for taking part, Jackson said. The incentive payments cover the adoption and use of an electronic health record and for performance on 26 clinical quality measures related to the treatment of diabetes, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease and for preventive health services.

CMS wants Louisiana to recruit 200 physician practices, Jackson said. The agency will randomly select 100 practices as a control group and 100 as the treatment group.