Remember the old TV show “Wide World of Sports” from the 1970s and ’80s? Who could forget that opening sequence — the one with that poor skier wiping out horrifically while Jim McKay, the legendary sports journalist, tells us solemnly that producers had been “spanning the globe” to bring you “the thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat”?

Well, we couldn’t help thinking that the results of Physicians Practice’s 2007 technology survey are kind of like that. Spanning your professional universe, our survey produced similar extremes. The numerous tales of unqualified success are accompanied by the many stories of catastrophic failure, some so bad that they’re as perversely irresistible as a car crash.

Stare at the wrecks if you like. But what’s truly important here is that the responses we received from the victors, the vanquished, and everybody in between serve as an invaluable instruction manual for you and your practice, no matter where you stand in terms of tech. There’s something for everyone, from beginners to experts, early adopters to foot-draggers.

Just like you

Before delving into the good, the bad, and the very ugly, here’s what you need to know about the survey participants. For the most part, they’re just like you. Of the 449 responses we received, 74 percent came from practices with one to five physicians. The remaining 26 percent break down as follows: practices with six to 10 doctors, 12 percent; 11 to 30 docs, 6 percent; and 31 docs or more, 7 percent.

Primary-care and multispecialty groups accounted for half of the respondents; medical and surgical specialty groups, the other half.

When it comes to EMR adoption, there is something of a divide between the “haves” and the “don’t wants.” Thirty-nine percent have a fully implemented system, and about a third are in some stage of planning, shopping, or implementing an EMR. Yet 27 percent have no plans of getting one anytime soon.

This being the third year for Physicians Practice’s tech survey, we now have some historical data for the purposes of comparison. The share reporting a fully implemented EMR has remained relatively static since 2005, hovering right around 40 percent. The proportion indicating no plans of buying one has increased every year, starting at around 21 percent and inching up to this year’s 27 percent.

The only other significant change is the share reporting having purchased but not yet fully implemented a system. That’s fallen every year, starting at 20 percent and reaching 12 percent this year.

Taken together, these trends seem to suggest that EMR adoption is flattening out, at best, and may soon wane. Several survey respondents blame their vendors for failing to help them fully exploit their EMR systems.



“It seems that, in general, those who write software really don’t seem to care about educating those of us who pay for and have to use their software,” one anonymous respondent writes, arguing that vendors should provide better instruction materials rather than insufficient training discs. “I’d love to have [a vendor’s training representative] come to my office just so I could hand them a scalpel and a ‘training disc’ and tell them to figure out how to do the surgery themselves!”

Walter G. Griffith Jr., a psychiatrist with a solo practice in the St. Petersburg, Fla., area, tells us EMR adoption was “one of the biggest challenges of my medical career and scared me to death in the beginning.” While he’s happy that all patient encounters are recorded electronically and there’s no longer a need to pull paper charts, he’s laboring to bring about additional technological advances. “Part of my problem is an inability to find dependable tech people who can solve network, hardware, and software issues.”

But these struggles pale in comparison to others. David Magier, for example, says his Long Island, N.Y., practice bought “an electronic medical records system for many thousands of dollars, and now it is totally useless and obsolete.”

Reason for hope