RAND Study: Beneficial Impact Of Electronic Health Records On Medical Care "Limited"

[Elmore Furth]

Electronic Medical Records was a cornerstone of the Obama Healthcare System. It was supposed to dramatically decrease cost and improve results of healthcare. It doesn't.

A 2009 study showed a similar result:

Little Benefit Seen, So Far, in Electronic Patient Records

Spurred on by considerable federal investment, electronic health records use is expanding rapidly in American hospitals. As much as $30 billion in federal grants for electronic health records investment in hospitals have been brought about after legislation approved in 2009.

Experts, health care professionals and hospital managers and administrators had expected significant improvements in quality of care to be one of the benefits of electronic health records. However, current data on the relationship between health information technology and quality comes from a small number of hospitals which may not be representative, as large teaching hospitals would be, or the first hospitals to adopt EHR (electronic health records).

This study, the authors explained, involving 2,021 hospitals - approximately 50% of the non-federal acute care hospitals throughout the USA - is the first to examine a wide range of hospitals, and assess the impact EHR might have had on quality of care.

However, hospitals that adopted no EHR technology also experienced improvements which were not significantly different from those with basic EHR.

Of concern were the findings for hospitals which adopted advanced electronic health records, whose heart attack and heart failure treatment improvements were inferior to hospitals with no EHR at all. As for pneumonia treatment quality of care, EHR was found to have no impact.


Beneficial Impact Of Electronic Health Records On Medical Care "Limited"

[toastbutter]

1. I have a lot of personal experience in this

as a person very close to me has been in charge of implementing a large hospital system's adoption of EHR, and I've personally used the software (CERNER's specifically). While I am interested in what this RAND study says (and I am a fan of RAND), it's a sad fact that many hospitals are still stuck using ANCIENT technology iow a pen and paper and this makes it difficult for disparate records to be quickly accessed, or even accessed at all in some cases. EHR is still in its infancy, but imo it will be as accepted as laser scanners at store checkout or CAD for cops and firefighters, etc. It's simply a system that needs to be in place everywhere.

[Warpy]

2. If they want better patient outcomes, they need to hire more nurses

because the greatest predictor of a good outcome is a nurse at the bedside, able to pick up complications early. They've done the studies on optimum staff to patient ratios and they know there is a quantifiable increased risk of patient death with each increase in that ratio. They just don't want to spend money hiring labor. They'd rather squander millions on gadgetry they can depreciate.

Medicine is labor intensive. If they want it to work, that's where they need to start. The rest is just a bunch of management window dressing.

[soryang]

3. Converting health records to electronic records is a bad idea

Like changing paper ballots to electronic ballots and changing mortgage notes to electrons. It facilitates fraud and corruption.

[bemildred]

4. Yah, the computer is not a general substitute for competent people who pay attention. nt