Dive Brief:
A new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has concluded that subsidies provided under the HITECH Act haven’t been effective at increasing adoption of EMRs by hospitals.
After evaluating EMR data from 2008 as a baseline, and calculating the amount of federal subsidies for new EMR adoption, researchers found that the 2011 U.S. hospital EMR adoption rate would’ve been achieved just two years later, in 2013, even without the help of federal incentives.
NBER found that EMR adoption among hospitals grew from 48% in 2008 to 77% in 2011 with the federal incentive payments. But the researchers also estimated that hospital EMR adoption would have hit 67% in 2011 and climbed to 77% in 2013 without the subsidies.
Dive Insight:
This study is likely to rock the EMR world—especially that of EMR vendors and consultants, who have been relying on dangling federal incentives as an excuse to get their customers moving. And government types aren’t going to be too pleased that HITECH set aside $20 billion plus to foster adoption, given that the adoption curve was shooting upward anyway.
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That being said, the study data doesn’t necessarily prove the point it was trying to make. Sure, hospital EMR adoption seems to have been on track even without paying the facilities to buy the EMRs. That being said, who’s to say that the clear momentum behind the hospitals’ adoption of EMRs—even without being paid to get in—isn’t due to the initial push that came from the first round of incentive payments?
While this data is interesting, it fails to definitively prove that the incentives were wasteful. Today, perhaps, the incentives are no longer needed, but they were when they were first established. It seems highly unlikely that so many hospitals would have waded into these waters without an extra reason to do it.
Date: October 17, 2014