November 5, 2009

Health Information Technology in the United States: On the Cusp of Change, 2009

The article was written by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, George Washington University Medical Center, and the Institute for Health Policy and published on November 5, 2009. It concerns the amount of data on EHR adoption in U.S. hospitals; much of the existing data has suffered from serious methodological shortcomings. Prior data on hospitals? adoption of EHRs suggest levels of adoption ranging between 5 percent and 59 percent, reflecting differing definitions of what constitutes an EHR, convenience samples and low survey response rates. To provide more precise estimates of EHR adoption among U.S. hospitals, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) commissioned a study to measure the current prevalence of EHR adoption in American hospitals to facilitate tracking of these levels over time.