The advanced use of electronic health records is starting to accelerate in hospitals, mainly because of the government's EHR incentive program, concludes a new analysis of HIMSS Analytics' Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) scale. The EMRAM scale is an eight-stage model that indicates where hospitals stand on the EHR adoption curve. A survey by HIMSS Analytics, the research arm of the Health Information Management and Systems Society, indicates that during the five quarters ended in September 2012, the number of U.S. acute care hospitals achieving EMRAM stage 5 or 6 increased by more than 80%; the number of facilities in stage 7 rose 63%.
