The Washington & Idaho Regional Extension Center (WIREC) announced last week that it had reached a milestone of signing up its 1,000th primary care physician (PCP) to use its services to help them implement and adopt EHRs. WIREC noted that it is one of the first RECs (162 in all) to reach that milestone.
Regardless of their target number or how many PCPs are in both states, it's an admirable achievement. After yesterday's blog about the results of a November CHIME survey, this is refreshing news. To recap, the confidence level of hospital CIOs who are CHIME members and participated in the survey for qualifying early for federal stimulus funds fell by nearly half.
Only five percent of community hospital CIOs expect to achieve early qualification for funding in the first six months of the program, compared to 23 percent. So it makes sense that 42 percent of community hospital CIOs anticipate speeding up their plans to implement EHRs, which is almost double the percent of respondents in the August survey.
Obviously, comparing hospitals and PCPs is like comparing apples to oranges, and that's not what I'm trying to do here. It is interesting, however, to overlay the survey results to WIREC's news.
It would be interesting to poll those 1,000 PCPs and ask them what their confidence level is in meeting Stage 1 meaningful use criteria. Maybe they feel it's ambitious but plausible, but if these PCPs are just now signing up for services to help them implement EHRs, chances are they are late out the gate for Stage 1 criteria. The exception is if they've implemented already and need help with aligning workflow with reporting functionality, for instance.
Is signing up at this stage of the game or being a late-comer a bad thing? It depends how you look at it. Now you have best practices, a regional extension center, financial incentive to adopt, whereas none of these existed for the early adopters. Those lessons learned will no doubt save time, human resources and money.
Ultimately, whether their confidence level is up or not, whether or not they have serious concerns, the good news is that these 1,000 PCPs took the first step to sign up for services. It is an invaluable first step.
Photo by Dryad & Sprite Photography courtesy of Creative Commons license.
