Quoted: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services collaborate with state agencies to give incentives to small practices to use health IT, with incentives totaling up to $58,000 per physician over five years or $290,000 per practice over five years

Physicians have until Nov. 26 to submit an application for the incentive. CMS, as of October, has received 18 applications, the organizations reported.

Quoted: According to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 60% said it is either extremely or very important for all their health information to be stored electronically in a central location so it can be shared by authorized providers.

But just 12% reported they are extremely or very confident that their records would remain confidential in an electronic format and shared through the Internet.

Quoted: The District of Columbia Primary Care Association will use Microsoft Amalga to enable the sharing of data among local hospitals and six community-based health centers that are part of a newly formed District of Columbia Regional Health Information Organization.

In mid-June, the Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital Foundation was awarded $334,268 to continue their ongoing implementation of a community-wide electronic health record system (EHR).

A project manager has been brought in to facilitate the transition for physicians. Consultants will be brought in to help with the standardization of the EHR and practice management systems and the conversion of the accounts receivable component.

The Hospital is in the midst of Phase II, which includes getting the hardware and interface infrastructure in place to enable the community connection... Phase III (September 2008?) will commence with five physician offices becoming connected, followed by a gradual rollout for the remaining 30 physician offices.

Quoted: "EHR is designed for outside groups to monitor what is going on in a clinical encounter. It slows the physician down. It is intrusive and there is great risk of information misuse. The adoption of EHR by my network has been one of the saddest events of my medical practice." - Anonymous

Quoted: U.S. physicians need to catch up with other industrialized nations -- such as Australia, Great Britain, the Netherlands and New Zealand -- in adopting electronic health records to enhance medical care and reduce costs.

If this country does not accelerate the conversion from paper to electronic health records, many health care reform promises will become irrelevant.

Quoted: Only 4% of U.S. physicians in ambulatory care have access to an advanced, "fully functional" electronic health-record system, but even those top-tier systems may not be fully featured enough to qualify for maximum payments under the new CMS pilot program to boost EHR adoption.

The summary was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The survey work was conducted under two $600,000 grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and another $3.6 million grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS (which paid for both the ambulatory-care EHR survey and a separate hospital IT survey that is yet to be completed).