Co-Hosted with HIMSS: A New Patient Centric RHIO Model

William A. Yasnoff, MD, PhD, FACMI, NHII Advisors, Arlington, VA, reviews a newly proposed business and operational model for RHIOs that is extremely cost effective to both build and maintain. Consisting of a central community repository for medical record information paid for and controlled by patients, it addresses three key problems RHIOs face: 1) providing financial incentives to office-based physicians for use of electronic health record (EHR) systems; 2) assuring overall financial sustainability; and 3) giving patients control over their health care information. The estimated annual per-patient fee of $50-100/year covers both operations and EHR incentives. Through payments of approximately $2-4 for submission of a standard electronic record of each patient encounter from a physician EHR, $10-20,000 of additional annual revenue/physician can be generated. This model also greatly simplifies the requirements for interoperability and promotes gradually increasingly encoding of ambulatory care information. See www.ehealthtrust.com