Hospital EHR Incentive Makes the Rich Richer

...Remember that most enterprise software projects in a hospital take multiple years to accomplish. Most hospital EHR implementations are an enterprise software project on steroids. That means that those hospitals that were already well down the path of EHR adoption are those that got paid the EHR incentive money. Those hospitals that could really use the EHR incentive money are still sitting there trying to figure out how they’re going to implement an EHR.

I’m sure there are plenty of cases where the EHR incentive money hastened EHR implementations that would have taken much longer. I know a number of hospitals that had EHR somewhere on their list of IT projects. No doubt the EHR incentive money bumped up the priority of that project. I can’t help but see the irony of Obama having an EHR incentive program that makes the rich hospitals richer...