Study: Health IT Costs $32K Per Doctor Each Year (We can do it better, of course)

Friday, I'm cleaning out my inbox and come across this from John Lynn's EMR and HIPAA.  Anne Zieger states that the Medical Group Management Association condicted a study that found that the average physician-owned multispecialty practice spends $32,500 per year on health IT.

While that only equates to about $7 per encounter, it adds up quickly.  The American Academy of Family Physicians calculated that the average group practice physician sees 93.2 patients per week.  So that's $650 per week, or $32,500 per year.  The median per capita income in the United States in the same period was $28,851.21.  That means that the average practitioner employs about 1 1/8 guys each just to keep the EMR up and running.  Even worse, this study doesn't include hospitals who spend hundreds of millions of dollars EACH for an EMR installation.  To add insult to injury, this does not include the approximately 1/3 of healthcare dollars that insurance companies are wasting managing data that could be managed automatically.

If you've been keeping up with Sentia Health's blog you know where we are going with this: Start a new insurance company that vends the EMR capable of completely documenting the patient encounter and showing the practitioner what is covered as the encounter is documented.  Then we perform our magic in the background and issue payment immediately for services rendered.  Sentia Health has already developed this EMR.

While Sentia Health's solution doesn't eliminate this $32,500 worth of health IT costs, it does significantly reduce it.  Most of you have either set up, or paid to have set up, a secure home network and the machines you use to access it.  That same kind of network is all the practice would need to use Sentia Health's EMR.  I received a little chrome book for my birthday that is extremely handy, has a super long battery life (it would last all day in a practice) and has a minuscule cost.  It would be perfect for using Sentia's EMR.    

I'm going to posit that we are getting close to cutting half of the cost of healthcare here at Sentia.  When you factor in the no cost use of Sentia's EMR, the ability to create questionnaires, the ability to email your practitioner, the ability to schedule appointments online and soon, even telemedicine and doing it all for $10 per month, I'm pretty sure that we are getting close to cutting half the fat from the system. 

$32,500 per year or $120?  Again, It's not quite that simple, but it's not too much more complicated either.  My personal health insurance bill is $465 per month.  I would sure like to see something around $250.  What would your health insurance cost be with that kind of reduction?

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