Electronic health records have been widely touted as a way to lower the overwhelming cost of health care. However, a new study by the Harvard School of Public Health may prove otherwise, the New York Times reports.
The study compared 3,000 hospitals at various stages in their electronic records programs, and found hospitals with advanced electronic records fared only marginally better than those with basic programs or no program. For example, the average length of a patient’s stay at a hospital with advanced digital records was 5.5 days. For hospitals with basic records or no electronic records the average stay was 5.7 days.
Quality of care standards saw similarly marginal results. Among patients with heart failure, best-practice standards were met 87.8 percent of the time at hospitals with advanced records systems; hospitals with limited records systems met quality standards 86.7 percent of the time and those with no records, 85.9 percent.
Dr. Karen Bell, a former senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services and senior vice president for health information technology services at Masspro, warns against dismissing the technology too early.
“There will be no clear answers on the overall payoff from the wider use of electronic health records until we get further along, five years or more,” she said.
Most of the evidence to support digital health records come from large hospitals like Kaiser Permanente and the Mayo Clinic, that have had these systems in place for years, according to the Times.