Five reasons your family doctor isn’t using EMR

the EMR is going to solve, and what processes must evolve in terms of workflow and actually getting value from the system, he explained.

"That whole problem-solving exercise becomes a big obstacle for most groups," said McLaren. "They get a little lost in the technical presentation of EMR and the glitz and the sexiness and very often lose sight of how they are trying to solve the problems of the paper world with electronic medical records so they can deliver better care."

One large challenge for a group practice in the paper world was keeping the filing up to date, said McLaren. "If a computer prints out a piece of paper and they send the paper to us and we put it back in our computer, that's not acceptable. We wanted other computers to populate our electronic medical records," he said.

McLaren's group interfaced with a local hospital and a local lab, which allows the group to receive lab results in near real-time and have patient records automatically updated every two hours. "The computer in the hospital pushes out all that data to me and our computer system pulls it in and electronically files it with a little pass through our electronic in basket to sign off on all the incoming data," he said.

"We've done our best not be an electronic island in a sea of paper. Unfortunately, I think we are quite unique in Ontario and in Canada. The ability to do what we've done -- there's far too many obstacles for most people to overcome," said McLaren.

Pinhas anticipates a lot of success by 2015 and a considerable amount of adoption. "But I think it's because the physicians will see a benefit to EMR, not so much because of the funding models that exist," he said.