ajfortin.com

We know the health-care-consuming-public wants doctors to wire up and get serious about using information technology in their practice (see my earlier post). Their general reluctance to get on board stands in the face of an avalanche of private and public incentives, programs, discounts, subsidies — all literally begging them to join the rest of Planet Internet.

Here’s one more attempt, this time by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS recently announced its DOQ-IT (Doctor’s Office Quality Information Technology) University, as one part of their Physician Focused Quality Initiative. The DOQ-IT is an on-line educational program designed to promote the use of health information technology in physicians’ offices nationwide. The program features an interactive web tool that initially will offer lessons on culture change, vendor selection, operational redesign, and various clinical processes. Lumetra, a San Francisco nonprofit, will help initiate the program to get doctors to use electronic health records and related technology.

In a pilot program conducted by Lumetra, the percentage of successful EHR implementations at small medical practices was 31 percent, twice as high as similar pilots by other vendors. Only 31 percent? (I’d like to see the ROI on this one.) But alas, the low numbers are unfortunately no surprise. They do give us, however, a good idea of just how rough this road is really going to be.