That’s the $6,000 question.

Typically, a practice can expect to pay $120 per user per month on their EHR system.

Although, this figure depends on a range of factors including, but not limited to, the size of the practice, number of users, and even the billing method.

Your EHR budget is something you need to consider in line with your requirements, user numbers, reasons for implementing and more. That’s why we’ve compiled the data on average budget, user numbers, and why practices implement a new system so you can determine the best budget for your EHR project.

So how much should you be spending on your EHR system?

There are many benefits to implementing an EHR, but it’s a costly system to implement. With all the features and requirements needed, it can be hard to determine what is the best budget for an EHR project. 

You don’t want to underspend on a system that will touch every component of your patient records, but you also don’t want to cost your practice more than necessary.

So, let’s take practice X as our example. It’s a practice with 20 physicians.

Our report data shows that you can expect 32 users for a practice of this size. A user, for an EHR system, includes both physicians and administrative staff.

Administrative staff can use your EHR to update patient information, organize appointments, and organize medical billing arrangements.

Physicians can use the EHR to update their patient records, e-prescribing, and take patient notes.

Although these are just some of the uses for an EHR system. To make things simpler, an EHR system touches most areas of your practice.

We can expect a practice of this size to spend $3,510 per user.

Practices of this size spend almost 50% less per user than the average EHR budget across practices of all sizes.

Typically, larger practices benefit from economies of scale making their cost per user lower.

When we break down this budget over the 5 years it covers, we find that the cost per user per month would equate to $59.

The total system cost for Practice X is $1,888 per month for all 32 users of the system.

Over a year, this cost equates to $22,656.

This is the system cost alone and doesn’t include any associated implementation costs or data migration costs.

Most large practices are implementing an EHR system to gain greater functionality.

Practices are aiming to streamline processes and improve efficiency in their practice using software. Typically, EHR is used to improve processes, data accuracy, and streamline administrative tasks.

Additionally, a significant portion are looking to support future growth in their practice. It’s positive that most practices of this size see an EHR system as an instrumental component in their future scaling plans.

Most of the practices we spoke to were currently using an EHR system.

In fact, all practices with more than 11 physicians were using an EHR system.

In our example, Practice X would be replacing their existing system. Typically, as a practice already has a system in place, this will require data migration from their current EHR to a new provider.

This can include data cleansing, and re-mapping a significant portion of sensitive patient data into new software fields and can incur additional costs.

Now we know what practices are searching for and considering when determining their EHR budget, we can determine how much you should spend on your EHR project. EHR budget varies depending on business size, you can use our EHR report to find accurate data on EHR budget for companies of the same size as yours.