Only 1.5% of nonfederal U.S. hospitals use a comprehensive electronic health record system, according to HHS-funded researchers in a report released by the New England Journal of Medicine and mirroring preliminary survey results released by the same researchers this past November.
Lead author Ashish Jha, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a staff physician at staff physician at Veterans Affairs and Brigham and Women’s hospitals in Boston, said in a news conference that just 7.6% of hospitals had a “basic” EHR that included the capability to record and store physician and nursing notes. The survey found that 10.9% of hospitals had a basic system without those clinical note-keeping functions.
“Very few hospitals in America have a comprehensive electronic health record,” Jha said. In addition, Jha said, “We didn’t get into effective use of these technologies. And we don’t have information right now with the notion of sharing data with other providers. Just because they have these systems doesn’t mean they are sharing that information with other doctors or hospitals down the street.”
That said, not all was gloom and doom. For one thing, if data from the VA hospitals, which were gathered but excluded from the final survey totals, were added back in, the comprehensive EHR adoption numbers would nearly double to 2.9% and the national numbers for the basic adoption rates would be driven up as well. More Here EMR