Increasingly, collections of medical records are stored and shared digitally by multiple medical service providers. RAND research has explored the costs of implementing electronic medical record systems; the benefits accrued, including the improved quality of care; the rate of technology adoption; individual privacy concerns; and the role of government in the use and growth of electronic recordkeeping.
COMMENTARY
Across the country, electronic medical records, designed first and foremost to make health care delivery safer and more efficient, are proving valuable when disaster strikes, write Mahshid Abir and Art Kellermann.
REPORT
This report, by researchers from Partners HealthCare and the RAND Corporation, primarily describes the work associated with Task 4.8 of the Advancing Clinical Decision Support effort, a project intended to accelerate the effective use of computer-based clinical decision support (CDS) interventions to facilitate evidence-based clinical practice. Twenty-two CDS artifacts and 16 value sets were developed that cover the five CDS intervention…
REPORT
The federal electronic health record (EHR) incentive program includes clinical decision support (CDS) as a central requirement of improving health outcomes; however, a process for identifying and prioritizing the most promising targets for CDS has not been established. This report describes a protocol for eliciting high-priority targets for electronic CDS for individual clinical specialties and summarizes lessons learned.
REPORT
For nearly a decade, RAND researchers have studied how health information technology (HIT) stands to change health care.
COMMENTARY
Providing physicians with cost data in real time automatically as a part of the electronic medical record could make them better purchasers for their patients and provide better value, writes Robert H. Brook.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
In offices where e-prescribing was implemented, prescribers used information about formularies and drug benefits, but missing information reduced confidence in these resources and led to paper-based workarounds.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
With or without electronic charting options, nurses spend about 19% of their time completing documentation, compared with all other categories of care.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
A panel of experts highlighted the complexity of issues surrounding development and implementation of a set of high-severity, clinically significant drug–drug interactions (DDIs) for use in electronic health records (EHRs).
PROJECT
A new online tool, called the "Unintended Consequences Guide," is available from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to help hospitals and other health care organizations anticipate, avoid, and address problems that can occur when adopting and using electronic health records.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Current federal standards for hospital "meaningful use" of health information technology--which requires electronic medication orders for 30 percent of eligible patients--are probably too low to reduce deaths from heart failure and heart attack among hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
The Guide to Reducing Unintended Consequences of Electronic Health Records is an online resource designed to help an organization anticipate, avoid, and address problems that can occur when implementing and using an electronic health record (EHR).
COMMENTARY
From the standpoint of policy makers, the basic challenge is to ensure that liability concerns do not derail the clinical value of new CDS technology, write Michael Greenberg and M. Susan Ridgely.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Using a 12-year county-level panel, this study found that a 10 percent increase in births that occur in hospitals with electronic medical records reduces neonatal mortality by 16 deaths per 100,000 live births.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Studies are needed that document the specific challenges of implementing health information technology and how these challenges might be addressed.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Although most physicians qualify for federal incentives to promote adoption of electronic health records, eligibility varies substantially by specialty and practice size.
RESEARCH BRIEF
Shares findings on the potential effects of electronic health records (EHRs) on health care quality, based on analysis of extensive data from 2003 and 2006 on EHR adoption, hospital characteristics, and hospital quality in nearly 2,100 hospitals.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Encryption is seen as a way to prevent malicious use of patient data, but there is no empirical evidence that it does.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
This paper reports an assessment of how well the structure and code sets specified in the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs Structured and Codified Sig Format represent ambulatory electronic prescriptions.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Use of electronic health records by hospitals across the United States has had only a limited effect on improving the quality of medical care.
NEWS RELEASE
Use of electronic health records by hospitals across the United States has had only a limited effect on improving the quality of medical care.
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