Electronic medical records pay for themselves

CHICAGO —The return on investment after implementing and electronic health records system is a major concern for facility owners, but a recent study showed how one academic medical center was able to recoup its investment within 16 months of installation.

“Health care providers most frequently cite cost as a primary obstacle to adopting an electronic medical records system,” said David A. Krusch, MD, FACS, of the University of Rochester Department of Surgery, and co-author of the study that was published in the July issue of the Journal of the AmericanCollege of Surgeons. “And until this point, evidence supporting a positive return on investment for electronic health records technologies has been largely anecdotal.”

The study measured the return on investment of installing EMRs at five ambulatory offices representing 28 providers within the University of Rochester (N.Y.) MedicalCenter. In November 2003, the offices installed a Touchworks EHR system from Chicago-based Allscripts. The installation took five months.

The researchers looked into activities such as pulling charts, creating new charts, filing time, support staff salary and electronic transcription. They then compared the costs of those activities in the third quarter of 2005 versus the third quarter of 2003.

The University of Rochester Medical Center estimated the EMR system reduced costs $393,662 annually. Nearly two-thirds of that savings came from a reduction in the time needed to manually pull charts, the center reported.

The EMR system cost $484,577 to install and operate, according to the study. Therefore, the center said it took about 16 months to recoup its investment. In addition, it cost approximately $114,016 to operate the system annually, which translates into a savings of $279,546 a year for the medical center, or $9,983 per provider.