Many Doctors Already Using E-Medical Records
Published: 2010-01-24 21:34:58By: Marianne Kolbasuk McGee | InformationWeek | January 13, 2010
While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's $20 billion-plus health IT stimulus programs aims to drive e-health record adoption among healthcare providers, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that about 4 in 10 doctor offices say they're already using these systems either partially or fully.
The National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS), conducted
annually by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), is
an annual nationally representative survey of patient visits to
office-based physicians that collects information on use of
e-medical/e-health record systems.
CDC has been conducting the NAMCS asking about
doctors' use of e-health record systems since 2001, but in 2005 started
adding questions to dig into more details about the functionality of
the systems, said Esther Hing, a CDC statistician involved with the
2008 and 2009 survey research.
The new CDC findings are based on a sample of 2,000 mail-in and 3,200
in-person physician surveys conducted in 2008, as well as preliminary
data from similar mail-in and in-person surveys conducted in 2009.
Doctors surveyed in person complete interviews conducted by Census
bureau personnel. In 2008, 2,233 doctors in total responded to the mail-in and in-person
surveys, while preliminary results for the 2009 research indicate that
1,054 physicians responded to the mail-in survey. Totals for in-person
surveys conducted in 2009 aren't yet available, said Hing in an
interview with InformationWeek. In 2008, 41.3% of all surveyed doctor offices reported using "any EHR
or EMR" system, and in 2009 that figure grew to 43.9%, based on the
preliminary figures of mail-in polls only.