Even with government incentives, transitioning from a paper-based environment to Electronic Health Record (EHR) software is costing healthcare providers a pretty penny. The cost of migration for hospitals can run from under $10,000 to over $50,000 per physician, with ongoing monthly fees of $300 to $700 per doctor. For a large provider network, costs can reach hundreds of millions of dollars to over one billion dollars. Even small physician practices are looking at an average cost ranging from $164,000 to $233,000 for an EHR transition in just the first 60 days.

The U.S. government has given the healthcare industry billions of dollars in incentives to make the switch from paper to electronic health records (EHR).  According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), 75 percent of eligible hospitals and 73 percent of healthcare providers have received incentive payments for attesting to EHR use under the meaningful use program established by the 2009 stimulus bill.