Is IT’s Luster Lost on Doctors?

Posted: October 30, 2014

The American Medical Association isn’t pulling punches when it comes to EHRs and other technologies the federal government is pushing in the name of improving patient care and cutting costs.

The group’s criticisms of the meaningful use program and its predecessor, the Medicare electronic prescribing initiative, aren’t new, but they’ve been getting new life in recent weeks as the AMA puts renewed pressure on lawmakers and regulators to scale back requirements that doctors use EHRs and other technologies in prescribed ways.

Last week, AMA President-elect Steven J. Stack told an IT industry gathering that in addition to trimming the criteria for physician use of EHRs, physicians want the federal government to kill the planned conversion to ICD-10 in 2015.

“We don’t want to pause anything. We want to gut the thing,” Stack told the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange annual fall meeting.

While it’s not clear what, if anything, lawmakers and bureaucrats are willing to do to ease what the AMA says are the burdens associated with acquiring and using new information technologies, it’s clear the AMA is committed to lobbying against federal health IT programs until they believe the changes make sense for physician practices.

Source: Bloomberg