Digital Health Records: What to Expect

If you’ve been following the news, you may have heard of President Obama’s plan to digitze all of the nation’s health records by the year 2014. In fact, the President has dedicated over $19 billion of his economic stimulus package specifically to kickstarting the digital health records revolution, by offering incentives to doctors and hospitals that take patients with Medicare and Medicaid (roughly 90% already do so), and setting up regional centers with “geek squads” to help physicians, hospitals and clinics get their digital records systems running smoothly. At the moment, only 17% of American doctors have a functioning digital records system in place, and less than 2% of the nation’s hospitals use electronic records in every department.

Obviously, this move will revolutionize the American health care system, effectively bringing it into the 21st century. But not everyone is happy about the change: Detractors have argued that the shift will do little to prevent costly medical errors such as misdiagnoses, and that the cost per office to make the switch to digital could be prohibitive, even with the government incentive. There are also worries about whether digital health records can adequately safeguard patient privacy.

What does all this mean for the medical billing profession? Fortunately, the shift to electronic records is great news for billers everywhere: Since almost all of their work is done on the computer already, it would be nice to see the rest of the industry catch up!