Hospitals struggle to share electronic medical records

Hospitals are failing to take advantage of the interoperability benefits of electronic medical records. Only 30% of hospitals are using (or sending) electronic medical records with outside organizations where a patient receives care, according to a study published in Health Affairs.   

“What this means is there is potentially a significant amount of waste and inefficiency in hospitals,” said lead study author Jay Holmgren of Harvard Business School in Boston.

This can lead to physicians reordering tests the patient has already had, or worse, making wrong treatment decisions.

The study found that instead of sending relevant pieces of the electronic medical record to the necessary provider, hospitals are focused on moving the entire record, making it burdensome for providers to find the information that they need. The most common barrier these hospitals reported to using outside information was that their clinicians could not see it embedded into their own system’s electronic health record.

“The findings in this article say that for the most part, hospitals are still not sharing data and even fewer are actually integrating that shared information into their electronic health records,” said Dean Sittig, a biomedical informatics researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Source: Reuters