Many healthcare experts believe that Electronic Health Records (EHRs) can enhance the efficiency and quality of healthcare. But what will happen to the costs that are linked with this kind of technology, especially for small group practices? A Research by Robert Miller Ph.D and his fellow colleagues from the University of California, funded by commonwealth found that for small scale practice that are using EHRs, their initial costs are $44,000 per physician.


These expenses does seem high but researchers estimated that on average a practice would cover its costs under three years and later it will profit considerably. But most of the physicians spend large amount of time at work in the beginning.  Some of the practices will face significant financial risks like billing problems, long payback periods and data loss.

Quality of life and financial costs

According to the costs they start from $37,056 to $63,600 per physician. Differences in expenses portray the different levels of current hardware before EHR implementation and negotiating and technical skills of office staff. Average yearly costs per physician are of $8,400 per physician were for software maintenance, hardware replacement support, further payments to information staff.

Providers also reported that they work for a longer duration on average of four months, but as they added data in software they become familiar with it. After the implementation period some providers also reported enhanced quality, accessing records from home and time savings.

Enhanced billing lead to efficiency

Regardless of the high initial costs average practices take around 2.5 years to pay for them according to the authors. The physician practices that were studied the benefits for them were $33,000 per year for each physician. The sources for these savings were the improved coding level that leads to improved billing and enhanced efficiency with the decrease in personal costs. All of the practice reported some savings that start from $1,000 to 452,000 per physician per year.

But some of the practices were not able to fare as well. According to the study one practice took nine years to cover it costs and another two didn’t paid for their EHR systems.

EHRs not being used for qualityimprovement

With Electronic Health Records physicians have some “automatic” benefits such as enhanced data accessibility, organization and legibility. All the study practices that are engaged in some kind of quality improvement EHR related activities. Two of the practices make an extensive use of EHR capabilities to further improve the preventive and chronic care. Twelve of the practices used computerized reminders but only five of them had the practice set reminders for patients with one type of chronic condition. Four of the practice made a list of patients which needed services such as diabetic patients whose hemoglobin tests are overdue and two of the practice generated report on provider performance.

Some facts and figures:

·       It costs average of $22,038 per physician for Electronic Health Record software training and installment.
·       Revenue gains related with efficiency accounted for 8.1 % of financial benefits but only three of the practices reported it.
·       Almost every provider used electronic health record for common tasks such as prescribing, viewing and billing. Few of the practices used it for quality improvement, patient-provider communication or performance reporting.