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BOSTON – Only 4 percent of U.S. physicians have a fully functional electronic health records system and 13 percent have a basic one, according to a study published in the June 19 online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The survey of 2,758 physicians – which claims to be the most up-to-date and comprehensive picture of EHR adoption trends – shows that 16 percent of physicians said their practice had purchased an EHR but had not employed it yet. Another 26 percent said their practice was planning on purchasing a digital recordkeeping system within the next two years.
“It is troubling to see just how slow physicians are moving to adopt this technology,” said David Blumenthal, MD, director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the study. “We need to get moving a lot faster than we have been if we are going to take full advantage of this technology and realize its promise for medicine.”
Lead study author Catherine DesRoches, an assistant in health policy at Massachusetts General, said getting more physicians to embrace EHRs is critical to breaking down the resistance to using the technology.
Blumenthal, DesRoches, and a team at Massachusetts General Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical College, and the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, conducted the nationally representative survey between September 2007 and March 2008.
The federal Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the study. According to John Lumpkin, MD, RWJF’s senior vice president, ONC paid $3.6 million over three years for the development of standardized methodology to perform the survey and an upcoming hospital survey.
The RWJF also provided a $600,000 grant for the first two years of work on a forthcoming nine-chapter report on healthcare IT entitled Health Information Technology in the United States: Where We Stand, 2008, co-authored by the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General and George Washington University.
In addition to looking at adoption rates, researchers sought to find out whether physicians find EHRs useful for practice, and the effect they have on patient care.
