The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has released a report to Congress on the status of HIT adoption across the country.
Key findings include:
- As of 2012, 44 percent of non-federal acute-care hospitals had adopted a basic electronic health record system. Common barriers to adoption include cost and feared loss of productivity among physicians.
- As of 2012, 95 percent of community pharmacies were active on the Surescripts e-prescribing network, up from 69 percent in 2008. About 54 percent of physicians currently use the network.
- About 80 percent of hospitals (3,800) and more than half of eligible healthcare professionals (291,000) have received incentive payments for achieving meaningful use as of April. Hospital adoption rates for each of the 14 Meaningful Use Stage 1 core objectives ranged from 72 percent to 94 percent.
- Critical access hospitals and rural hospitals have adopted EHRs at the lowest rate, and only 9.1 percent of critical access hospitals and 8.3 percent of rural hospitals received an incentive payment for EHR adoption or attesting to meaningful use.
- Approximately 65 percent of healthcare providers who are not eligible for incentive payments have adopted an EHR system at one or more of their sites.
- Medicare providers working with a Regional Extension Center were over 2.3 times more likely to receive an EHR incentive payment in 2012. More than three-quarters of critical access hospitals are currently working with a REC.
- Overall, 25 states and territories have query-based healthcare information exchanges available to providers statewide, and 11 states have operational query exchanges available in certain regions.
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