Dr. Elliot King

Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) are one of the essential lynchpins in Healthcare IT. In the long run, EHR will be the comprehensive record for patient care. Even a basic EHR will contain a listing of all of a patient’s diagnoses and help prevent harmful drug interactions. And if we’re lucky, EHRs will also eliminate the need to fill in all that nasty paperwork with complete health histories, every time we go to a specialist.

The good news is that the use of electronic health records grew more than 6 percent in 2011, according to the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) yearly survey on the use of electronic health records in physicians’ offices. In 2011, 57 percent of office-based doctors used electronic medical records/electronic health records (EMR/EHR), according to the CDC. That number compares to the 50.7 percent of physicians’ offices using EMR/EHR’s in 2010 and 48.3 percent in 2009.

The CDC numbers were higher than those reported in the Physician Office Usage of Electronic Health Records Software report last fall by SK&A, a leading provider of healthcare information solutions and research. Their report is based on an ongoing telephone survey of 237,562 U.S. medical sites. According to SK&A, the overall EHR adoption rate was 40.4 in 2011. 

As could be imagined, several factors drive the adoption of EHRs, including the number of physicians in the office, the number of examining rooms and the patient volume. Not surprising, the more doctors in a practice, the greater the number of examining rooms and the larger patient volume, the higher the EHR adoption rate. For example, one-doctor offices had approximately a 30 percent adoption rate while offices with more than 26 doctors had a 75 percent adoption rate.

Although by all measures, the rate of adoption of electronic health records has been slow, it may finally be reaching the tipping point. The clarification of Federal rules that made doctors eligible for what are called meaningful use incentives coupled with a 2012 deadline has encouraged more doctors to take the plunge with EHRs.

But getting physicians to use EHRs is only the first step and unfortunately may be the easiest (even though it hasn’t been easy) in developing a nationwide Healthcare IT ecosystem for the US. Ultimately, these records will have to be accessible to a wide range of stakeholders, stored and retrievable for long periods of time, and compliant with a huge number of state and federal regulations as well as HIPAA regulations governing the protection of confidential health history. If you think of Healthcare IT as a complex system like the earth, an EHR is like the single cell organism created in the primordial soup. The evolution to a fully functioning healthcare system has just begun. It will take industry, physicians and government agencies working together to make it happen.

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