News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups
Hosted by Robert Michel

News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups
Hosted by Robert Michel
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$17 Billion in HITECH Act Funding Encourages Doctors to Adopt EMRs; Integration with the Clinical Laboratory LIS is Crucial

May 10, 2010 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations

Surge of requests for LIS-to-EMR interfaces will soon hit clinical pathology laboratories

EMR adoption by office-based physicians is about to seriously challenge the capability of the nation’s clinical pathology laboratories to quickly build interfaces with the electronic medical record (EMR) systems of their client doctors. That’s the prediction of one of the nation’s foremost experts on how to connect clinical pathology laboratories with physician EMRs.

“Today, only one of four physicians uses electronic medical records. To encourage more physicians to adopt medical record systems over the next five years, the ARRA stimulus package is offering major financial incentives,” observed Pat Wolfram, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Service at Ignis Systems Corporation in Portland, Oregon. “In fact, if the federal government achieves its goals as set forth in the current stimulus package, we can expect more than 300,000 physicians to adopt EMRs over the next five years!”

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Do or Die: Clinical Laboratories Must Invest to Build Up LIS-EMR Interfaces with Physicians’ Offices

Jan 19, 2010 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology

Experts predict a surge in the number of physicians using electronic medical record systems

By dangling as much as $20 billion in front of physicians to encourage their adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems during the next few years, Congress has created a new and expensive challenge for the nation’s clinical laboratories. That challenge is the need for every pathology laboratory to establish a high-function interface from its LIS to the office-based physician’s EMR.

According to one expert, the government’s “carrot and stick” strategy to reward doctors financially for adopting EMR’s, will soon force independent medical laboratories and hospital laboratory outreach programs to play catch up with LIS-EMR interfaces to maintain access to physician referrals and the revenue that accompanies these laboratory test specimens.

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