As health IT companies prepare their presentations for HIMSS 2010, which starts next week, a survey comes along suggesting the nation still has a long way to go before every doctor's office enters the digital age.

According to the report, published Thursday by research firm SK&A, a division of Cegedim, only about a third of physicians regularly use electronic health records, even though this figure is up 3.2 percent from last February.

The Irvine, Calif.-based research company conducted the survey by calling 180,000 doctors, of whom around 36 percent work with EHRs.
But the rate of adoption wasn't even: large practices and hospital- and health system-owned centers were much readier adopters of EHR than independent practices, with half of all doctors at health-system owned offices using EHR, compared with merely 34 percent at non-system owned sites. (Hospitals saw about 10 percent more use, with 44 percent of doctors at hospital-controlled practices using EHR as against 34 percent of those at non-hospital sites.)

The results don't surprise Jack Schember, vice president of marketing at SK&A.

"If a medical practice is owned by a hospital or a health system it's more likely that there are policies in place for technology implementation," he tells DOTmed News. "Hospitals had adopted electronic recordkeeping long before doctors did," he adds.

Differences in adoption extended to the specialties, too. More than half of all physicians in radiology, emergency and aerospace medicine, critical care and dialysis were working with electronic records, compared to slightly less than a third of those in immunology, general practice and general surgery.

Interestingly, the most popular application of electronic records was for note-taking. A plurality of doctors, 28 percent, used EHRs for jotting down notes, with slightly fewer opting for electronic lab or X-ray reports or e-prescriptions.

Again, Schember believes favoring note-taking makes sense when one considers how a doctor's office runs. "That's where they have the biggest headaches," he says. "You see how notes are done in the doctor's office. They're scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed in a manila folder and put in a rack behind the receptionist's desk. But if it's done electronically, all the [records of the] patients in the practice can fit on one laptop."

SLOWER THAN EXPECTED

The results of the survey come about a year after President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, a stimulus bill with provisions that call for financial incentives to encourage doctors to move their files from paper to silicon.

"[The growth rate is] a little slow in my estimation, but we estimate it'll grow significantly more in the next 12 months, as the government does a better job publicizing its incentives to physicians," Schember says.

SK&A says their results match up well with a similar study put out by the Centers for Disease Control, which found that around 44 percent of doctors work on some kind of electronic health record system. Schember says the discrepancy between the two studies could partly be explained by the CDC using a mail-in questionnaire with multi-part questions that might have been more sensitive to certain aspects of EHR functionality.

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