Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had set goals for widespread EHR adoption by 2014. While EHRs are still far from ubiquitous, significant progress has been made nationwide in moving from paper-based healthcare.
"Those were aspirational goals," said Harvard School of Public Health professor Ashish Jha, MD, in a Washington Post report. "Most of us thought there's no way we're going to get close [in 2014]." However, he said the pace of EHR adoption in the U.S. has been impressive. "There is no country in the world that has moved this far, this fast on EHR adoption," he said, according to the report.
Below are five statistics on EHR adoption over the past five years.
1. In 2008, less than 10 percent of hospitals had an EHR system. By the end of 2013, 58.9 percent had at least a basic system, according to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
2. By 2013, 89 percent of critical access hospitals had installed full or partial electronic health record systems. Despite high adoption, CAHs were less likely than any other types of hospitals to have met meaningful use criteria in 2013 due to significant challenges fully adopting and using EHR software, according to a study in Health Affairs. The most-cited challenge was implementation costs.
3. As of 2011, 80 percent of federally-funded health centers had adopted an electronic health record system, according to a recent study in the Journal for Healthcare Quality.
4. Physician EHR adoption has also increased. In 2009, 21.8 percent of physicians had a basic EHR system, which increased to 48.1 percent of physicians by the end of 2013, according to the RWJF report.
5. According to the Physicians Practice 2014 Technology Survey, 26.2 percent of the 1,442 respondents who had not purchased an EHR said the cost of implementing the system was the main reason they had not yet done so. However, this percentage is 4 percentage points lower than the 2013 survey, suggesting that cost is becoming less of a concern, perhaps due to meaningful use incentive payments.
More articles on EHRs:
HIMSS: How EHRs can help hospitals reduce mortality rates
"It takes us too long to identify problems": Pew Charitable Trusts director on EHRs
Study: Only 5.8% of hospitals could meet all MU2 requirements