Quality Gains Elusive with EHRs

By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today Published: January 24, 2011 Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Electronic health records (EHRs) have been promoted as making outpatient care more efficient and boosting quality -- but data from two large prospective surveys seemed to find no clear improvement in the quality of care resulting from EHR use. Reports on more than 250,000 outpatient visits indicated that, among 20 indexes of care quality, only one -- diet counseling for high-risk adults -- showed significantly better performance in EHR-related visits compared with visits tracked with conventional record-keeping systems, according to Max J. Romano and Randall S. Stafford, MD, PhD, both of Stanford University. Their findings, reported online in the Archives of Internal Medicine, emerged from analysis of data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey from 2005 to 2007, covering 255,402 patient visits to physician offices and hospital clinics./.../