A new research, published this week in the American Journal of Managed Care, found that the adoption of electronic medical records (EMR) in U.S. hospitals has limited effect on the quality of care.
The researchers at the nonprofit Rand analyzed the quality of care at 2,021 hospitals between 2003 and 2007 across three conditions: pneumonia, heart attack, and heart failure. The number of hospitals using either basic or advanced EMRs grew from 24 % in 2003 to 38 % in 2006.
Not only did the researchers find no improvement in care when hospitals adopted EMRs for the first two conditions, pneumonia and heart attack, but they also found that the greatest improvements in care they observed were for people with heart failure in hospitals using only basic EMRs; where EMRs with advanced quality scores actually led to less improvement than at hospitals that totally lack them.
In other words, when it comes to quality of care, sophisticated EMRs may be offering less than pretty bells and whistles. But the researchers reported that more work needs to be done to determine if they are even measuring EMRs' effect on care accurately.
Spencer Jones, lead author, said: "The lurking question has been whether we are examining the right measures to truly test the effectiveness of health information technology. With the federal government making such a large investment in this technology, we need to develop a new set of quality measures that can be used to establish the impact of electronic health records on quality."
Legislation approved in 2009 could direct upwards of $30 billion in federal aid to hospitals adopting electronic health records. This study suggests that in order to know whether EMRs are worth the cost, their impact on quality of care must be further investigated.
