Dive Brief:
- A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association has concluded that healthcare providers, including those in the same practice, vary substantially in how they use EMRs.
- To conduct the study, researchers examined 430,803 visits of 99,649 patients by 112 physicians and nurse practitioners working in federally qualified healthcare centers in New York City.
- Researchers concluded that providers varied greatly in how they used the systems, including how often they updated patient problem lists, when they responded to clinical decision support alerts and their use of the meaningful use objective metrics.
Dive Insight:
The research found a number of reasons for the wide variation in EMR use among providers, including the provider's overall familiarity with an EMR system, a provider's understanding of the patient's medical problems and staffing differences at health centers, which was found to affect workflow. The authors concluded that this broad variance in providers' EMR use was worth future study, as individual level measures of usage could add value to studies on quality and cost outcomes of EMR use.