62% of Hospitals are Not Using Patient Information Outside Their EHRs

As nearly every U.S. hospital has an electronic health record system installed, sixty-two percent of¬¬ hospitals aren’t using patient information outside their EHRs in Q1 2018, according to a new survey conducted by Black Book Market Research. The report reveals hospitals are still struggling with exchanging patient health records with other healthcare providers, particularly physicians not on the same EHR platform. In fact, twenty-four percent say they are still unable to use much meaningful patient information received electronically from external sources as currently shared outside siloed EHRs.

In the report, Black Book crowdsourced 3,040 current hospital EHR users to provided feedback on their intentions to renew current contracts, purchase additional products and services such as HIE, population health tools and revenue cycle management, and the propensity for the client to recommend their inpatient EHR/HIT vendor to peer hospitals.  

Interoperability Challenges

Eighty-five percent of network physicians look to their core health system EHRs to enable interoperability among integrated healthcare delivery providers in order to set the stage for data-intensive initiatives such as population health, precision medicine and value-based payment models. Other interoperability challenges identified include: 

Twenty-seven percent of medical record administrators report the transferred patient information was not presented in a useful format, which surprisingly increased five percent higher than in 2017 indicating a slip in improvement efforts.

Thirty percent of hospital-based physicians polled last month state the data they view cannot be trusted for accuracy when sent between disparate systems from external providers.

“In 2018, 57 percent of hospital network physician practices operating on assorted EHRs report they continue to lack the financial and technical expertise to adopt complex interoperability which are compulsory to attain higher reimbursements built into value-based care initiatives by both public and private payers,” said Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book Research.