Community Health Network of West Virginia > Solutions > RPMS-EHR

Health information technology is a relatively new tool in the health care system. Other industries such as banking have integrated technology tools to transform the industry through on-line transactions and the use of ATM machines. Health care remains very paper driven and manually oriented. As noted from numerious studies on the subject, cost of HIT and concerns about software functionality, security, privacy and interoperability (the ability of the software to communicate and exchange information with other HIT systems), along with the impact on provider productivity are very real barriers to more rapid adoption of HIT, especially in primary care settings.

A study reported in Health Affairs indicates the initial cost of EHR adoption in small and solo practices is approximately $44,000 per FTE provider per year, and ongoing costs average about $8,500 per FTE provider per year. There are studies that contend that even with funds provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) that doctors may have to pay substantial sums to implement EHR's as the payments are incentives for adoption and not 100% subsidies. In order to truly meet the requirements of the ARRA and still remain revenue positive an organization must look toward lower cost solutions. Open Source electronic medical record systems provide a lower cost, yet functionally rich alternative to higher priced commercial software packages. As can be seen by the graph below, the implemenation costs of RPMS for Community Health is more than 50% less than the Health Affairs average for EMR adoption:

On-going support costs are also dramatically lower than the Health Affairs average as demonstrated by the graph below:

Many lower cost EMR solutions are able to have lower investment requirements due to functionality gaps, limited support, and nebulous corporate sustainability. The RPMS for Community Health EMR is a full-featured, CCHIT certified system, backed by a United States Government entity: the Indian Health Service. Because it is a CCHIT certified system, it is functionally equivalent on core operations and requirements as systems that cost twice as much. And because IHS is directed to maintain CCHIT certification for the EMR that it uses, you can be rest assured that there will always be funds available for continued development of the application - even as other companies see their R&D budgets cut and no matter what enhancements are required to maintain certification in the future.