Louisiana pitches in as part of CMS push for EHR utilization

BATON ROUGE, La. Last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a plan to implement a five-year demonstration project to encourage small to medium sized primary care physician practices to use electronic health records.

One of the states taking part in this program is Louisiana. In correlation with the CMS program, the governor included $18.6 million for health information technology initiatives, including $3.5 million in financial incentives for physicians who use recognized EHR software in their practices, according to published reports.

In addition, earlier that month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services named the Louisiana Health Care Quality, a nonprofit created to lead evidence-based collaborative efforts, as a Chartered Value Exchange. This federal agency is the centerpiece of the Health and Human Services Value-Driven Health Care Initiative. U.S. Health Secretary Mike Leavitt has described the exchanges as pioneers at the forefront of a nationwide movement to transform the health care sector.

LHCQF president Dr. Michael Fleming said the increase in consumer-driven care may be the final push that forces physicians to implement EHRs. He also noted that one of the quality forum’s goals is to help collect and understand the health data.

“If we can’t collect and understand and analyze the data, there’s no way that providers can know how to improve their performance, and frankly, the public can’t know how to make better choices,” Fleming said.

There is still a lot of room for improvement in EHRs, Fleming said. Less than 20 percent of EHRs include the three pieces that actually improve quality: patient registries, reminder systems for preventive and early detection studies, and just-in-time information systems.

Russell Klein, president of the Louisiana State Medical Society, said the EHR is the wave of the future, and physicians will be forced to implement the records’ use.