A little electronic help for docs helps hospitals, study shows

Hospitals that use a computerized medical-information tool to help doctors make decisions at the point of care have better patient outcomes than those who don't, according to a new study in the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Researchers at Harvard University examined data for Medicare beneficiaries at 1,017 hospitals between 2004 and 2006 as the hospitals adopted a clinical-information system called, UptoDate. They compared that with data from 2,305 hospitals that don't use the system and found that use of the system was an independent predictor of reduced mortality, shorter hospital length of stay, and better performance on widely used hospital quality metrics.