Even a 10 percent increase in the hospital use of electronic medical records could save 16 babies for every 100,000 live births in the U.S. And, making a complete national transition to EHRs could save an estimated 6,400 infants each year nationwide, according to a new study published in the Journal of Political Economy. The study looked at the death rates of infants at hospitals with and without EMRs in more than 2,500 counties nationwide over a 12-year period. The data set permitted the researchers--Amalia Miller of the University of Virginia and RAND, and Catherine Tucker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management--to control for other factors that could impact infant mortality, such as an area's socioeconomic status. --Read the full post at FierceEMR