Garbage In, Garbage Out

The majority of office-based physicians today interact with their patients without the benefit of interacting with EHRs. Percentages vary depending on which study you read. A Harvard Medical School study from 2008 reports only 17% use EHRs, but the recent National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey says better than 41% are EHR users.

If you spend enough time walking around healthcare conference exhibit halls and listen to enough EHR vendors, you'd be surprised that most medical doctors choose not to purchase and implement EHRs. What physician wouldn't want a technology that is easy to use, keeps patient records safe, helps with coding and billing, and provides decision support?

Are doctors waiting for an EHR that files their taxes for them, too?

Not exactly. I've heard lots of excuses over the years about why physicians are "resistant" to EHR adoption. I've been told that docs are too stingy, don't like change, and fear technology (of all things).

None of these is close to being a valid point. You want to know the real reason why most physicians have passed on EHRs?

Because up until recently most physicians didn't believe EHRs provided enough value for their commitment of time and money. They heard about the pains of early adopters who spent months installing systems only to rip them out and start over from scratch.

Now providers have carrot-and-stick motivation from a federal government that's investing some $20 billion on healthcare information technology. To be fair, today's EHR systems are superior to those of a few years ago, and vendors have a lot riding on helping providers install certified systems that exceed meaningful use requirements.

But the real hard work will be done by provider organizations. That's one message that is clear in this issue of HealthLeaders. In our cover story we point to examples of health systems like North Shore-LIJ that are aggressively implementing IT solutions and finding creative ways to spread that technology to affiliated physicians. Unfortunately not all providers have the ability to work with large, progressive systems, but even on a smaller scale, physicians will need to seek out ways to leverage their communities and hospitals to install systems that can someday break down the healthcare industry's silos of information.

By the way, researchers for that National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey I mentioned above also tried to measure how many physicians are using "fully functional" EHR systems. They found only 4% do so.

The real hard work remains to be done.

Rick Johnson
Editorial Director
rjohnson@HealthLeadersMedia.com