Study Conducted from 3,000 Hospitals Show Little Short-term Benefits from Electronic Medical Records
After doing some more research on EMRs, I came across an article from the New York Times in regards to the success of electronic medical records. The government has spent $19 billion as an incentive to motivate hospitals and physician offices to drop the paper and ink and adopt computerized patient records. Some estimates show that approximately an annual $100 billion in health care costs will be saved once the conversion has taken place.
According to Steve Lohr, author of Little Benefit Seen, So Far, in Electronic Patient Records, “a new study comparing 3,000 hospitals at various stages in the adoption of computerized health records has found little difference in the cost and quality of care”.
“The way electronic medical records are used now has not yet had a real impact on the quality or cost of health care,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the hospital study.
The research was presented on Monday, November 16 at a conference in Boston. The study was a “follow-on study” to a survey of hospitals’ adoption of electronic health records, published this year and financed by the federal government and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“Very few hospitals today are effectively using the capabilities of electronic health records,” said Dr. Karen Bell, a former senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services, and an expert in health technology. She was not surprised by the results of the research she observed.
“There will be no clear answers on the overall payoff from the wider use of electronic health records until we get further along, five years or more,” said Dr. Bell, senior vice president for health information technology services at Masspro, a nonprofit group. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go forward.”
LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/16records.html?_r=1
