Study shows electronic health records are associated with improved physician performance
A new study provides evidence that electronic health records (EHRs) enhance the quality of patient care in a community-based setting with multiple payers. Study results are published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Until now it had not been determined whether EHRs improved the quality of patient care, especially in areas that use commercially available systems.
“This is one of the first studies to find a positive association between the use of EHRs and quality of care in a typical community-based setting, using an off-the-shelf electronic health record that has not been extensively tailored and refined. This increases the generalizability of these findings,” says the study’s lead investigator, Dr Lisa M. Kern, associate professor of public health and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.
The use of EHRs is growing. This is due, in part, to the federal government’s investment of billions of dollars in incentives promoting the use of these systems. The objective is to track and improve patient outcomes. According to the study’s senior investigator, Dr Rainu Kaushal, director of the Center for Healthcare Informatics and Policy and the Frances and John L. Loeb Professor of Medical Informatics at Weill Cornell Medical College, “The findings of this study lend support to the very significant investments in health information technology that are being made by the federal government, states, and health care providers.”
This study was conducted with the Health Information Technology Evaluation Collaborative (HITEC), a multi-institutional assessment of the impact of New York’s health information technology strategy. In 2008, the researchers collected data related to the quality of patient care across 9 measures from nearly 500 physicians and 75,000 patients. These data were from ambulatory practices located in a region of New York where there has been a concerted effort to implement EHRs. They gathered data from 5 different health plans.
Study results showed that 56% of physicians who used commercially available EHRs provided significantly better quality of care than physicians using paper records for 4 measures: hemoglobin A1c testing in diabetes, breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, and colorectal cancer screening. Furthermore, the collective score across all 9 measures suggested that EHRs led to better patient care than paper records.
“EHRs may improve the quality of care by making information more accessible to physicians, providing medical decision-making support in real time and allowing patients and providers to communicate regularly and securely,” says Kaushal. “However, the real value of these systems is their ability to organize data and to allow transformative models of health care delivery, such as the patient-centered medical home, to be layered on top.”
Source: Weill Cornell Medical College.