Doctors slow to adopt electronic records

Despite a nationwide push toward electronic medical records, a minority of doctors have adopted them, and much fewer use them effectively.

A report in the Annals of Internal Medicine looked at nearly 2000 primary care physicians and specialists in office-based practices, and evaluated their usage of electronic health records (EHR).

Only 43.5 percent reported having a basic EHR, and just under 10 percent met meaningful use criteria (a checklist for tasks like referrals and online prescriptions). The 43.5 percent is a significant rise since 2011, when only 34 percent had basic EHR.

In some countries EHR are universal, but in the United States, “fewer than one half of respondents reported the presence of computerized systems for any of the patient population management tasks included in the survey.”

But according to the report, this slow adoption is not simply physician intransigence. Rather, the systems have been inadequately designed. “Results support the growing evidence that using the basic data input capabilities of an EHR does not translate into the greater opportunity that these technologies promise.”

This is particularly disturbing since the federal government, according to Bloomberg, “has spent about $15 billion since 2009 to help doctors and hospitals adopt electronic health records, fueling growth for vendors such as McKesson Corp. and Cerner Corp.”

In a related commentary, Ross Koppel, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that we want these promising innovations to work for everyone, “we must shift from cheering health information technology implementations to demanding health information technology utility.”

Meeting Meaningful Use Criteria and Managing Patient Populations: A National Survey of Practicing Physicians (Annals of Internal Medicine, Jun. 4, 2013)

Most Doctors Don’t Meet U.S. Push for Electronic Records (Bloomberg, Jun. 4, 2013)