Few Hospitals Embracing Electronic Health Record Systems

Researchers say cost, doctors' reluctance to change are main barriers to adoption

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

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WEDNESDAY, March 25 (HealthDay News) -- Only a small number of hospitals in the United States have comprehensive electronic health record systems currently in place, a new study finds.

The biggest obstacle to adopting such systems are costs, which can run as high as $20 million to $100 million, plus the reluctance of doctors to change their ways, experts say.

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"President Obama, members of Congress and other policymakers have been pushing the notion that we need to have electronic records in hospitals and doctor's offices to make our health-care system work better," said lead researcher Dr. Ashish K. Jha, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

But few hospitals have adopted these systems, Jha noted. "Achieving the vision of having electronic health care records deployed widely across the health-care system, we have a very long way to go," he said.

The report is published in the March 25 online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

For the study, researchers questioned 3,049 U.S. hospitals about their electronic health record systems. They found that only 1.5 percent of these centers had comprehensive systems. A comprehensive system was defined as hospital-wide clinical documentation of cases, test results, prescription and test ordering, plus support for decision-making that included treatment guidelines.

Almost 8 percent of hospitals have an electronic records system that includes physician and nursing notes, but these systems do not have decision support. Some 10.9 percent have a basic system that does not include physician and nursing notes, and can only be used in one area of the hospital. When looking at computerized prescribing, the researchers found that 17 percent of the hospitals had this capacity, the researchers found.

The staggering cost of these systems has been a deterrent: The researchers noted that many hospitals don't have the resources to pay for them and there is no way to recoup the investment. "Hospitals don't get any more money for implementing these systems," Jha noted.

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