The Trump administration plans to work with the American Board of Family Medicine to study how health IT tools can be improved for doctors.
The HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) awarded a cooperative agreement to the American Board of Family Medicine to measure the use and potential burdens experienced by office-based physicians.
The evaluation will provide ONC with national-level data on how physicians use health IT, including key measures on interoperability and burden, the agency said.
The effort builds on prior research that found, in 2017, approximately 80% of office-based physicians used a certified electronic health record (EHR), but only one in ten of those physicians reported that they were able to electronically send, receive, find, and integrate health data from EHRs outside of their networks.
EHR burdens have been a near-constant complaint from physicians that see the technology as an impediment to their relationship with patients. Numerous studies have documented the time suck of the technology.
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HHS has made other efforts to address health IT usability issues. In February, the agency released a report that outlined 43 recommendations around clinical documentation and health IT usability.
Under the three-year cooperative agreement, the American Board of Family Medicine will develop key measures related to health IT use and the interoperability of health information and also collect data from a nationally representative sample of physicians to support national level progress.
The organization also will work with ONC on the analysis and interpretation of the survey results.
ONC wants to use the data will help identify disparities or unintended consequences due to the use of health IT and the impacts of federal health IT policies to guide future policy decisions.