Cost of full EHR implementation in U.S. could reach $150 billion

SAN FRANCISCO According to Robert Miller, a professor of health economics at the University of California, San Francisco, full implementation of networked electronic health records in doctors’ offices and hospitals in the United States could cost around $150 billion over eight years.

Miller’s projections call for hospitals to spend $35 billion to acquire and expand EHR systems and $55 billion in new operating costs over eight years. He said this level of spending would bring hospitals’ information technology spending closer to that of other industries.

Fewer than 5 percent of doctors are using fully functional EHRs, Miller said, using figures recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. To equip the remaining 96 percent with EHRs will cost about $15 billion in capital outlays and $24 billion in new operating costs, he said.

To those costs, he added about $20 billion for EHRs in nursing homes and the offices of other medical professionals, bringing the total to around $150 billion. However, he said the grand total could be as low as $100 billion or less because of offsetting increases in medical revenues and other factors.