A whopping 96 percent of U.S. hospitals now have electronic health records (EHRs) certified to federal Meaningful Use standards. That’s up from 72 percent in 2011, the first year of the Meaningful Use EHR incentive program.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, announced the statistic at its annual meeting in Washington Tuesday morning.
That number may be a tad misleading, however, because possession of an EHR system means the hospital has a signed contract with a vendor. It doesn’t mean the system is in place.
Still, ONC reported that 84 percent of hospitals had “basic” EHRs in use in 2015, up ninefold since 2008. A basic EHR meets specific criteria for functionality, which exclude clinical documentation and clinical decision support.
ONC also put out some rosy numbers suggesting that interoperability of health IT is growing fast. The agency said that 82 percent of nonfederal hospitals “electronically exchanged laboratory results, radiology reports, clinical care summaries or medication lists with ambulatory care providers or hospitals outside their organization” last year, double the total from 2008.
But just 26 percent of hospitals were able to find, send, receive and actually use patient summary-of-care records with outside sources in 2015. Less than 40 percent could use or integrate external data into their EHRs without manual entry, ONC said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Deputy National Coordinator Dr. Jon White reportedly got cheers from the gathering when he promised that ONC would help patients get “their damn data,” borrowing a rallying cry from the patient empowerment movement.
We're gonna give them their damn data" @pjonwhite says to cheers #ONC2016 pic.twitter.com/7NJoqGmMim
— Brian Ahier (@ahier) May 31, 2016
We anxiously await details on how this is going to happen. So far, everyone seems unhappy with EHRs, with lack of interoperability and with problems related to patient access to data.
Images: Photo: Franck Boston/iStock/Getty Images, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
