Adoption of electronic health records in hospitals lags behind previous estimates and is expected to be more costly and difficult than predicted, says a study released Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Many medical experts agree eliminating paper records would help save lives and make health care more efficient and less costly. But a survey of nearly 3,000 hospitals found that only 1.5 percent have comprehensive electronic records in all units. An additional 7.6 percent have a basic system in one unit that includes physicians’ or nurses’ notes.
Earlier reports estimated the portion of hospitals adopting electronic records ranged from 5 percent to 59 percent. The latest survey was done by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, Biostatistics Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the VA Boston Healthcare System, the Institute of Health and the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University. It had a 63 percent response rate and is the first reliable data, the researchers say.
To rank as having comprehensive health information technology (HIT), 24 functions were required in a hospital’s major clinical units. The functions range from doctors’ notes to diagnostic test images to computerized provider entry for medications. Eight functions had to be present in at least one major clinical unit for the basic program. Only 12 percent of the hospitals had physicians’ notes.
“If we want to improve health care, I think we’re really going to need to see much more widespread deployment of a lot of the key functions that are at low rates,” says the report’s lead author, Ashish Jha of Harvard. “Certainly in those ways it seems that we have a long ways to go.”
The numbers from the survey “validated what we’ve been hearing,” says Don May of the American Hospital Association. “We’ve heard some have…