For Some Practices, EHRs Aren't Worth It

Looking to sell your medical practice? Don't waste time and money upgrading your IT.

For medical practices looking to put themselves up for sale, investments in new EHR systems might appear to be a smart way to up their value in the market. But that's not usually the case. If you’re trying to beef up the value of a medical practice, don’t bother upgrading your electronic health record system, says one expert, since hospitals will have ideas of their own.

So goes the suggestion from Black Book Rankings, whose recent 2013 Top Practice Management and Revenue Cycle Management Ambulatory EHR Software Vendors report found that 63 percent of independent practices believed that they could improve the value of their practice through a technology upgrade or implementation before selling.

But reality soon hit home. Ninety-eight percent of survey respondents said that such investments actually devalued their practices’ worth.