2017 Technology Survey Results

Practices across the country have graded the health IT industry, and it's not a pretty result. In fact, the health IT industry will have to get its parents to sign its report card because its grade is that bad.Nearly 75 percent of practices agree with former CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt, who said the health IT industry has failed because physicians do not like the technology they use for the most part. This is according this year's annual Physicians Practice Technology Survey, which looks at the usage of technology at the practice level from more than 500 (mostly independent) practices across the U.S.Furthermore, 67.9 percent of practices say they have not seen a return on investment as a result of their purchase of an EHR system. On the other side of the coin, most practices (54 percent) are either very satisfied or satisfied with their EHR vendor.The 2017 Physicians Practice Tech Survey also looked at practice readiness for adherence to CMS' Quality Payment Program's Advancing Care Information (ACI) guidelines, which replaces the Meaningful Use program in measuring how practices are adopting EHRs. Overall, 50.1 percent of practices understand the ACI guidelines, 49.5 percent of which have begun to prepare to adhere to these guidelines. Of the 49.9 percent that don't understand the ACI guidelines, 38 percent say they are having trouble understanding the Quality Payment Program in general, while 28.4 percent say they don't know the difference between ACI and Meaningful Use.Here are a few more highlights of the survey:
• The most pressing tech problem, according to respondents, is meeting government and private payer requirements (22.5 percent); second most common answer was optimizing use of the EHR (16.5 percent).
• More than 80 percent of practices say their practice hasn't been hacked in the last 12 months.
• In most practices (31.1 percent), physicians decide to invest and select tech products to purchase.
• Only 12.6 percent of practices have used telemedicine.Above are partial results to the 2017 Technology Survey. The complete results to the survey will be made available later this month.