Despite years of efforts pushing health IT adoption, most physicians and many hospitals still have not yet adopted electronic health records, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
Health care experts say EHRs can help health care providers avoid potentially dangerous medical errors and cut administrative costs. Several heath care market analyses say the savings from nationwide EHR adoption could exceed $30 billion annually.
The overwhelming majority of physicians surveyed by Harvard University researchers, who published their findings last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, said EHRs boosted the quality of their clinical decisions, increased communication with patients, improved access to health records and reduced medical errors.
Low Adoption Rates
According to the Union-Tribune, President Bush's goal to provide a portable EHR to every U.S. resident by 2014 is unlikely.
The Harvard researchers found that just 4% of physicians use a fully functional EHR system.
Meanwhile, an American Hospital Association survey found that 68% of the country's roughly 6,000 hospitals have implemented some type of EHR system, but most of those systems have been rolled out only in parts of the facilities, such as pharmacies or laboratories.
Costs
Physicians are wary about investing in EHRs because of the cost and uncertainty about who will profit the most from the technology, the Union-Tribune reports.
Among physicians without an EHR system, 66% said the high cost of purchasing a system was a major barrier, according to the survey by Harvard researchers.
Converting to an EHR system can cost a medical practice $70,000 or more, and the transition can lead to additional training costs and lost production time during the adoption phase. The cost of digitizing all of the country's health records has been estimated at tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars.
Much, if not all, of the adoption costs eventually could be recouped through savings created by EHRs, according to the Union-Tribune. However, most of those savings would go to health care payers, such as insurers and government agencies, and it is unclear if they will share the savings with those who shoulder the upfront costs of EHR adoption.
Other Concerns
In the April 17 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, several physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston raised concerns after the hospital adopted an EHR system.
They wrote that mistakes in EHRs can be spread far more extensively than those on paper. They added that the ease of copying and pasting generic text from one EHR to another could compromise details that are unique to each diagnosis.
In addition, the physicians wrote that some doctors spend more time looking at the computer than talking with their patients (Darcé, San Diego Union-Tribune, 8/31).