The American College of Physicians has released a position paper that endorses e-health programs, but it also calls for doctors to receive higher fees for their use of health information technology.
“E-Health activities have great potential to transform health care in the United States,” Dr. Joel Levine, chairman of the ACP board of regents, said at a Washington press conference today. At the same time, he said increased payments are needed to compensate doctors for the cost of acquiring and maintaining the technology.
Dr. David Dale, president of the organization, said doctors also should be reimbursed for accepting patients’ online health records, reviewing them and adding to them as needed. As the biggest payer for Americans’ health care, he said, “the Medicare reimbursement should provide initial and sustained funding” for doctors’ health IT.
The wide-ranging position paper, “E-Health and Its Impact on Medical Practice,” also calls for harmonizing privacy and security rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act with local privacy rules.
It recommends that the needs of those with low literacy, few computer skills and little money be taken into account when designing e-health programs.
Noting that today’s doctors generally get paid only when a patient visits the medical office, the ACP also is asking that doctors be paid for remote patient visits through telemedicine setups, for exchanging secure e-mail messages with patients and other forms of telemedicine, such as reading outputs from monitoriing devices.
It generally endorsed these telemedicine activities, saying that not all patients needed to be seen in the office for every visit, and called for more federally supported research into telemedicine.
Rather than casting e-health technology as a time-saver, Dale and Levine emphasized the extra time doctors will need to spend interacting online with patients in an era of e-health. For example, they said doctors may need to check out Web sites that would be useful to a certain patient, or answer more patient questions via e-mail.
The ACP is backing the movement to establish medical homes, doctors’ offices or clinics where the patient is known and his or her care is coordinated. Dale noted that IT is needed to make medical homes effective. “It will cost a significant amount,” he said.
The ACP is the nation's second-largest organization of physicians, after the American Medical Association. It represents doctors who practice internal medicine.
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