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A study released last month raised a number of questions surrounding the government’s multi-billion dollar effort to spur the use of electronic health record (EHR) systems in hospitals and physicians offices.
The study, which was led by the Harvard School of Public Health, compared 3,000 hospitals that are at various stages of adopting computerized health records. Overall, the study found that there was very little difference in the cost and quality of care between those that had adopted e-health records and those that hadn’t.
The results of that study need to be taken seriously, but at the same time more questions need to be asked. The study did not provide details, for example, on whether the hospitals studied were fully utilizing the capabilities of the e-health systems installed. It has been estimated that the implementation of electronic medical records systems could save the U.S. health care system up to $100 billion a year, but those savings will only come if hospitals and physicians make use of the systems’ capabilities.
A study released this week by drug giant Pfizer indicates that the benefits of EHR systems don’t always boil down to dollars and cents. Pfizer studied 300 physicians, two-thirds of whom used some form of EHR system and one-third of whom used a paper-based system. The survey found that physicians using EHR systems were much more likely to report side effects from drugs than their paper-based colleagues.
The reason seems pretty clear: It can take physicians as long as 40 minutes to fill out all the paperwork required by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to report an adverse side effect.
Dr. Jeffrey Linder, an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said the Pfizer survey results confirmed observations seen in a pilot where physicians were provided with an electronic system to report drug side effects. “The system we used in that study was well accepted by the participating physicians,” he said. “While most of the participating clinicians submitted no reports in the year prior to the study, they submitted hundreds of detailed reports during the five months of the study period.”
If you were to do an analysis of the financial benefits of the side effect reporting system, you would probably be hard pressed to come up with any savings. But clearly, the benefits of collecting more data about the reactions of patients to drugs, is substantial.
The same applies to the larger EHR initiative. The financial benefits won’t always be obvious, but over long run, the impact on the quality of patient care will be.
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