It is true that billing is a priority and there are profit incentives at work. That's exactly why it's worth it for hospitals to improve the data entry user experience!
Better documentation means more revenue. If your doctors and nurses are not filling in the forms because the interface isn't user friendly, you're losing money.
This is not actually the way the system works, as currently designed, and so correspondingly this is not how EMR systems are designed. The documentation that matters is capturing the procedure codes and inventory codes for billing -- and EMR systems and the associated hospital workflows and security mechanisms are designed around making sure that those billing codes must be entered in order to do anything else.
I asked one of my Smarter Dx colleagues who's an expert on this subject to clarify, and he had this to say:
> There are 2 types of billing, even for hospitalized patients. FFS and DRG based payments. Fee For Service does depend on capturing those billing codes correctly. But DRG based payments depend solely on documentation and the billing codes are irrelevant. FFS is 2/3s of US health care spend currently ($2.6T) while DRG is $1.3T.
Better documentation means more revenue. If your doctors and nurses are not filling in the forms because the interface isn't user friendly, you're losing money.