Obama's Hard Slog in Health IT

President-elect Barack Obama says the government must invest in health care IT despite a severe economic slowdown because creating electronic health records will help cut billions from health care spending. Putting aside the very serious roadblock of an economy in free fall, Bob Charette, a Tech Insider blogger who also writes The Risk Factor blog, warns in a post that the push for health It faces some other obstacles that s going to make a transition to e-health records "a slow, hard slog." He says Tom Daschle, Obama's pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, will have a tough time because so few doctors have the kind of sophisticated systems that are networked in such a way to take full advantage of the benefits that e-health records (EHRs) afford:

For example, a survey report released yesterday by the National Center for Health Statistics which is part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that only 4 percent of U.S. doctors use fully functional EHR systems, while 20.4 percent reported using a system described as "minimally functional and including the following features: orders for prescriptions, orders for tests, viewing laboratory or imaging results, and clinical notes."

Lack of money to invest in EHRs is a big - if not the biggest (lack of accepted EHR standards is another) - reason for the slow uptake, and given the financial pressures on hospitals and small physician practices today, I wouldn't be surprised that the next survey shows a very small increase in EHR adoption if any at all.