EMRs missing the mark on care coordination efforts
Published: 2010-01-21 17:20:39By: Pamela Lewis Dolan | American Medical News | January 18, 2010
The government's expectation that electronic medical records will dramatically improve care coordination across multiple care settings might come up short if changes are not made to both policy and EMR systems themselves, according to a recent study.
The Center for Studying Health System Change found that EMRs are helping coordinate care within a practice but are less helpful with exchanging data between care settings.
Researchers from HSC conducted phone interviews with doctors or staff from 26 practices that had commercial ambulatory care EMRs for two years. They also spoke to CMOs at four EMR vendors and to four national thought leaders. The study, "Are Electronic Medical Records Helpful for Care Coordination? Experiences of Physician Practices," was published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in December 2009. A summary is available; access to the full study needs a subscription.
David Blumenthal, MD, national coordinator for health IT, said the study "looks at the state of affairs before the HITECH legislation. It emphasized how valuable it would be to have financial incentives to encourage use of records for care improvement purposes and it pointed out there was no interoperability, which was a limiting factor." It also says not all the records are useable, he added.
Financial incentives are available through HITECH, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (part of the federal stimulus package) that gives credit of up to $44,000 per physician for purchase and meaningful use of EMRs.
Dr. Blumenthal said the study reinforced that Congress, as well as his office, are on the right track.
The study also showed support for EMR use. "There were some nice quotes in this article along the lines of never going back, about physicians that are having access to information at their fingertips and being able to meet patient expectations consistently ... that took a really different tone from the headline of this study," said Melinda Buntin, PhD, an economist and director of the Office of Economic Analysis and Modeling in Dr. Blumenthal's office.