Roughly four out of five U.S. physicians (78 percent) using electronic health records reported that their system enhanced their overall patient care, according to research recently published in Health Services Research. The study analyzed responses of 3,180 physicians to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2011 Physician Work Flow questionnaire.
The survey also found that 81 percent of EHR users said that their system helped them remotely access patient records. Sixty-five percent of respondents found that their system alerted them to potential medication errors, while 62 percent had their EHR alert them to critical lab values. Perhaps not surprisingly, the benefits were most likely to be reported by physicians who were Meaningful Users of their EHRs and had more experience with their systems. Abstract