There are reports being published that say that EHRs have failed to reduce administrative billing costs for medical practices. This has led many people wonder whether the Health IT systems are really as efficient as they are marketed.
Granted that EHRs offer many benefits and some very good ones even help in saving a lot of time which allows physicians to see more patients and the practice ends up making more money, yet there are reports where EHRs were implemented with the aim of them helping in reducing administrative costs and they failed to do so. Duke and Harvard and researchers found that primary care services actually cost healthcare providers approximately $100,000 annually.
Qualified researchers from Duke University and Harvard Business School studied the use of a certain certified EHR at a large academic healthcare system. They found that the estimated costs for insurance and billing-related functions were quite substantial and differed by the type of each clinical session.
The team observed five distinct patient encounters namely, primary care visits, discharged emergency department visits, general medicine inpatient stays, ambulatory surgical procedures, and inpatient surgical procedures. They found that the administrative costs actually accounted for a staggering one-quarter of the entire professional revenue for some patient encounters. Researchers said that this was caused by changing contracts between hospitals and plans along with the addition to variants in price schedules.
Costs of insurance and billing-related functions was found to be ranging from 13 minutes or when it comes to costs $20 per primary care visit. This escalated to a staggering $215 for 100 minutes session for an inpatient surgical procedure. The study found that it was about 3% to 25% of the total professional revenue.
On the whole, the study found that billing costs for primary care services were approximately $100,000 per provider, annually.
