Stimulus bill could force more physician mergers-WEB ONLY

Now that Medicare is calling for all doctors it deals with to use electronic medical records by 2015, it could hasten the trend of physicians merging with hospitals or larger groups.

But it could also speed up the retirement of aging physicians at a time when they are in short supply.

That’s according to John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, a Connecticut-based market research firm. He figures that about 75 percent of doctors currently do not use an electronic medical record system that will meet Medicare’s requirements.

Even though physicians now can get $44,000 from the recently passed stimulus bill if they start using electronic medical records by October 2011, the average EMR system costs more than $30,000 – plus a lot of time to figure out how to use it. Many doctors won’t want to deal with the resulting slowdown in patient volumes or the change in their work habits, Lovelock said, so they’ll look for alternatives, like becoming part of a larger group.

“For the primary care physicians, that’s already been happening,” said Keith Pitzele, president of Indianapolis-based RANAC Corp., which sells computer systems to doctors, noting that his own personal doctor recently joined the St. Vincent Physician Network. “We probably will see more of that.”

But a worse outcome for the health care world would be if many baby-boomer physicians just retire rather than hassle with installing an EMR. “An option still open to physicians would be to exit the market,” Lovelock said.

That would be bad timing. Indiana, for example, has 3,500 fewer physicians than it should, according to a 2006 study by the Indiana University School of Medicine.