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Physicians, hospitals slowly expand e-health records

By Mary Mosquera, GCN Staff

Physicians and hospitals are adopting electronic health records very slowly, about 3 percent more than last year, the Health and Human Services Department determined in a report released Wednesday.

About 25 percent of physicians use some form of electronic health record, but only one in 10 doctors practice with a fully operational system, said the report that measured the adoption of health IT. Only five percent of the 6,000 U.S. hospitals use computerized order entry, a component of electronic health records for electronic prescribing or electronic ordering of lab tests.

The Office of the Coordinator for Health IT contracted the study with the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard School of Public Health and George Washington University. It is a joint project with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Other organizations evaluate the extent of adoption, but the national coordinator’s office in the Health and Human Services Department sought a consistent way to measure health IT usage to provide a benchmark on which to assess annual progress and to standardize definitions and terminology, said Karen Bell, director of the Office of HIT Adoption in the national coordinator’s office.

“The bottom line is that it is the line in the sand that we are starting from,” she said at a briefing releasing the report.

Equipped with a baseline of adoption, HHS will be able to gauge the effectiveness of policies and, as a result, make revisions or recommendations where necessary, she said.

“As we put new policies in place, new technologies come to bear, new certification processes are implemented, [and] we will be looking at health care policies that will guide us in what to do over the next several years. It’s really a tool to guide us in our decision-making,” Bell said.

HHS will share the data with the electronic health records working group in the public/private American Health Information Community advisory group to assist it in developing recommendations to accelerate adoption.

“We know there are issues around reimbursement, medical [and] legal concerns, technology — not only are systems interoperable but are systems usable — and cultural issues. Without recommendations to address these, we are not going to be able to move the adoption agenda forward in time to meet the president’s goal for electronic health records for most Americans by 2014,” she said.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Health IT, Management, New Products / Technology, IT Management



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