Doctors aren't embracing technology as much as the rest of society—and it could spell out trouble for them, a study by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions finds.
Twenty percent of physicians provide online scheduling or test results for their patients and just 6 percent use social media to communicate with them, according to Deloitte's "Physician Perspectives on Health Information Technology" report.
Moreover, measured against the IT goals and deadlines prescribed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, only 25 percent of physicians are "on target" to meet the incentives.
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Though doctors are more confident about their ability to satisfy the mandate and upgrade their medical billing and coding systems, with just 21 percent saying that will not meet the October 2013 deadline, 62 percent of physicians cited managing ICD-10 documentation as a "major concern."
Still, Harry Greenspun, senior adviser for the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions and lead author of the report, says other areas of the survey demonstrate that physicians accept the value of health IT. Two-thirds of doctors say they use some form of electronic records to manage clinical information and a similar number believe IT can improve care long term.
"The voice of physicians today seems to have two components: One that accepts the value of information technology to improve quality and safety of care and another that expresses concern over its cost and potential to disrupt how they practice," Greenspun says. "This dissonance is one reason why it is not further entrenched in our health care system."
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