US doctors paid €30,000 to use EHR

North Shore Hospital Group on Long Island, New York is offering 7,000 doctors incentives of up to €28,500 each over five years to adopt digital patient records.

The hospital has already made a €284m ($400m) commitment to digitise patient records throughout its system, which includes 13 hospitals, following the promise made last year by Barack Obama that all Americans would have an electronic health record within five years.

The US president committed €13.5billion ($19 billion) of incentive payments to computerise patient records in order to improve care and reduce costs.

North Shore Hospital Group has said it will pay doctors 50% of the total cost of electronic health records that can communicate between the doctor’s office, labs and hospitals.

The subsidy will rise to 85% for doctors who agree to share data on patient measures, including glucose levels for people with diabetes and post operative procedures and prescriptions for heart patients.

The initiative at North Shore will begin with 100 physicians before it is rolled out further.

The hospital group will deploy the EHR via tablet personal computers from Dell and software from AllScripts, which can be retrieved by a doctor using PCs, BlackBerrys and iphones.

Glen Tullman, chief executive of Allscripts told the New York Times: “This is big enough and bold enough that hospital groups across the country will take notice and rethink their own plans.

“This was not done on pure dollars-and-cents, return-on-investment perspective. But better healthcare and getter quality should be a good investment.”

The €28,500 ($40,000) is in addition to government support for computerising patient records which can award doctors €31,000 ($44,000) over the same period.