Cost Benefit 1

Implementation of an EMR system is tremendous task no matter what the size of your practice, medical group, hospital or HMO. Demonstrating the financial benefit and potential return on investment for EMR implementation is not an exact science. As a manager or administrator, it is difficult to decide to commit hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, on a project with out a guarantee of a positive return on investment with in a reasonable amount of time. Many of EMR’s benefits are not financial and other can be difficult to quantify. This is one of the primary reasons why EMR implementation has not proliferated beyond 15% of hospitals and medical groups while most in the health care industry are still using paper charts and manual systems and processes.

Depending on the size and scope of an organization, every EMR implementation is going to be different. Costs will vary from installation to installation. Yet, for the cost-benefit analysis several basic assumptions will be made in regards to costs and benefit of the system. Our costs will be based upon a one physician practice, which can be used as a benchmark for multiple physician practices (economies of scale could affect the numbers 10-30%) . This practice sees 30 patients a day. The assistant to physician ratio will be 3 to 1. The office receives 100 phone calls a day for appointments, prescriptions, billing inquiries and other reasons.