EHR usage update

We are now three years into the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare’s Meaningful Use EHR adoption incentive program. According to CMS’s website, as of March of this year, $14.8 billion in payments have been made to the over 470,000 providers and hospitals participating in the program. Those are some big numbers! But what about the people who are using the systems? Can we tell whether or not any of this is making a difference in quality of care? What about health care provider workflow or job satisfaction? Earlier this year, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a systematic review, carried out by the Rand corporation and funded by the Office of the National Coordinator (the main federal body overseeing Health IT efforts) which examined the effectiveness of several Health IT system functionalities, including those required to achieve Meaningful Use, for improving the delivery of health care. In the review, they evaluated 236 articles published between 2010 and 2013.  36% of the studies selected addressed clinical decision support (CDS), 21% computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and 20% looked at more than one functionality that’s required for Meaningful Use. The authors looked at quality, safety and effeniency outcomes reported in the articles. Overall, the measure of efficiency seemed to be the most mixed bag of positive, negative and neutral outcomes, illustrating that in clinics Health IT systems both increase efficiency in the some cases and ...
Source: Dragonfly - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Technology Source Type: news