Healthcare facilities are working to adopt electronic health records (EHR) as part of their practice, and studies show just how quickly they are catching on.
In 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. To enhance the flow of patient information among clinical providers, HITECH promotes the implementation of EHR systems to exchange patient data. By using federally defined “meaningful-use criteria” and providing states with funds to help build needed infrastructures, the improved flow of critical records is expected to save money and improve the quality of healthcare.
One Annals of Family Medicine study looked at the record of a federally funded program providing “incentive payments to eligible professionals who adopt and ‘meaningfully’ use specific EHR capabilities.” The incentives appear to be working, say researchers. By 2012, 72 percent of office-based physicians had adopted “some type of” EHR, a 60 percent increase in just two years.
Doctors working in larger practices or those owned by hospitals and academic medical centers significantly increased their adoption of EHRs. Rural practices bettered their urban counterparts, while specialists lagged behind primary care doctors.
The study also concluded that physicians’ concerns that employing EHR might increase their workloads and confuse patients were “unfounded.” In fact, researchers report when patients learn the benefits of readily obtaining their own records, they shop for doctors who will provide them.
Another study in Health Affairs surveyed healthcare organizations nationwide to determine the number and type of organizations implementing information exchange systems. It also identified what obstacles “threaten the viability of such efforts.” Researchers say the number of participating hospitals and ambulatory care practices has doubled and tripled respectively since 2010. Major obstacles include lack of funding and the inability to develop a sustainable business model.
Three stages define HITECH’s level of “meaningful-use” implementation, and another Health Affairs study looked at how many U.S. hospitals were at which stage in 2012. Only 42.2 percent met the criteria established for stage 1, and 5.1 percent met the benchmarks set for stage 2.
By 2015, all hospitals must have achieved stage 1 implementation to avoid federal sanctions.
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