AMA is sponsoring a seminar called "Financing electronic health record (EHR/EMR) systems: Should your practice accept a donation?".
Looks like the open market making up for gov't inefficiencies. At first it seems like a salvation army effort to donate something that still works but isn't useful to the hospitals (like donating an old phone system), but look at it long-term and you see that it only slows down the transition from paper to electronic records.
Here's why: using a sub-par, used EMR system in your practice isn't going to help your practice if the doc next door buys a state-of-the-art system. Plus, interfacing not conversion is the more important issue. The EMR has to talk to other EMRs, pharmacies, scheduling systems. Old systems don't have this capability. The main reason I'm against this is because a practice's paper process indicates how well its electronic process will be. So if you make a lot of medical errors on paper, you'll probably do the same (if not worse) on an electronic system.
Bottomline: Bush passes initiative (in 2001) to have every practice/hospital on an EMR by 2014. He doesn't provide ANY financial help whatsoever to make this happen. Hospitals try to convert on the cheap and realize they need to upgrade within the next 5 years. Having an EMR becomes the cost of doing business, like having credit card machines at a department store. Financing (the money it costs to implement) is a NON-ISSUE. Do it well the first time, don't take hand-me downs and upgrade faster than the next guy. Adopting early makes you better off in the long run.