Adoption of electronic medical records in U.S. hospitals

Due to the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, there has been a rise in the number of federal investments in programs that increase EMR adoption.

Hospitals have been using different suppliers of health data systems in order to adopt electronic medical records.

[6] The decision of choosing an EMR vendor like Epic or Meditech can fall on either hospital leadership or the corporate level based on the size of the system.

If the system is larger, the decision is made at the corporate level, though several people from the hospitals remain involved.

[5] The first stage of implementation is called “design, build, validate,” where the vendor is selected and the plans are put in place.

[5] To create success, both Geisinger and NY Presbyterian utilized clinical teams to develop the EMR system, and therefore gained staff and physician buy-in.

However, these hard stops were created collaboratively to achieve physician buy-in and ensure that they were appropriate for care delivery.

Allowing tailoring of the EMR system is essential to both before implementation and afterwards, and physicians and clinical staff must be used in this development process to create success.

MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, OH, has published an evaluation of the EpicCare EMR by Epic Systems five years after implementation.

MetroHealth's methods included a web-based survey for primary care providers to measure their level of utilization of the EpicCare EMR.

The survey results revealed several areas that can benefit from improvement, such as ongoing training and support as well as the optimal utilization of all EMR functions.

Their goal is for every physician in their organization to adapt the EMR at a 100% utilization rate in order to increase efficiency and reduce adverse patient outcomes.

450 physicians were required to attend a 16-hour training session in order to obtain a certification that would allow them to admit patients.

EMR utilization has saved JKL Healthcare approximately $50,000 on office supplies and has significantly reduced the number of medical records staff.