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A frequent concern I hear in my conversations with physicians is that they are challenged by increasingly harsh economic pressures. Healthcare reform, lower—or at best stagnant—reimbursement rates from government and private payers, and the higher proportion of lower-paying Medicare patients are reducing or capping practice revenue. At the same time, overhead costs are escalating unrelentingly, since employees still expect raises and other operating costs continue to rise. While the common perception is that physicians are not businessmen/women, they are in fact running small businesses; and now, more than ever, they need to focus on ways to maintain business viability in light of lower margins.

The above graph illustrates the economic challenges. Click on it to enter your own practice data and assumptions concerning anticipated growth or decline in reimbursement and expenses, and observe the effect on physician income—the green line. Given that physicians have no control over reimbursement rates, the only way to positively impact that green line is by effecting fundamental changes to practice operations—and the right EMR is critical to this end.

First, it is imperative to significantly reduce overhead—the orange line. Government programs that may, or may not, deliver short-term financial incentives do not address cost structure. What is needed is an EMR that delivers sustainable and significant reductions in the staff-to-physician ratio and more efficient management of all resources—depressing the orange line. Increasing revenue—the blue line—requires increases in physician productivity and patient volume. The challenge here is to wade through EMR marketing hype to identify the EMR that will actually shift the orange line down and the blue and green lines up.

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Read More: http://blog.srssoft.com/2010/09/preserving-physician-income-emr-strategy/