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Electronic Health Records in Ambulatory Care — a National Survey of Physicians

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Submitted By haanya
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Health-information technology, such as sophisticated electronic health records, has the potential to improve health care.1-3 Nevertheless, electronic-records systems have been slow to become part of the practices of physicians in the United States.4,5 To date, there have been no definitive national studies that provide reliable estimates of the adoption of electronic health records by U.S. physicians. Recent estimates of such adoption by physicians range from 9 to 29%.4,5 These percentages were derived from studies that either had a small number of respondents or incompletely specified definitions of an electronic health record.5,6
To provide clearer estimates of the adoption of electronic-records systems by U.S. physicians, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology of the Department of Health and Human Services4 supported our project to develop and test measures of adoption and to deploy those measures in a representative national survey of U.S. physicians. The goal was both to gather accurate information on current levels of adoption and to provide survey items that could be used to generate similar data over time on the diffusion of electronic health records and on physicians' perceptions of the effect of such systems on their practices.
This report addresses the following questions: What proportion of physicians report that outpatient electronic health records are available to them in office practice? How satisfied are physicians who use such systems, and what effect, if any, do they believe these systems have on the quality of care they provide to their patients?
METHODS
Survey Development
The survey was developed by the investigators, with guidance from a consensus panel of experts in the fields of survey research, health-information technology, and health care management and policy and from representatives of hospital and

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