Dear RIS Insider,
Healthcare IT makes for some strange bedfellows, at least when it comes to electronic healthcare record (EHR) adoption in the U.S. In recent years, evangelizing for EHR systems has found even such political polar opposites as Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich sharing the same stage.
In May 2004, President Bush appointed Dr. David Brailer to the new position of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the Department of Health and Human Services. His charge is to provide every U.S. citizen an electronic record of their healthcare by 2014, and link all their records into the yet-to-be-created National Health Information Network.
However, with slightly more than eight years left to achieve this objective, a recent survey by the Medical Group Management Association and the University of Minnesota found that EHR adoption by medical group practices stands at just 14.1%.
It's not that practices don't want EHRs -- more than 60% of the surveyed practices indicated a desire to have an EHR system in place within the next two years. They cite perceived benefits from the technology to be improved access to medical record information and improved workflow from integrating the systems into their business.
But EHRs can be expensive, and it's still a challenge to integrate them with other types of healthcare information technology, such as RIS and PACS networks.
To learn more about the real-world results of EHR adoption and implementation, click here. As a RIS Insider subscriber, you have access to this story before it's published for the rest of our AuntMinnie.com members at the end of the week.
Finally, if you have a comment or story to share about any aspects of RIS or healthcare IT, please get in touch with me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.
