80% of Hospitals plan on EHR funding

Four-fifths of the nation’s hospitals, and 41 percent of office-based physicians, currently intend to take advantage of federal incentive payments for adoption and meaningful use of certified electronic health records (EHR) technology, according to survey data released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).

The survey information was released as the registration period opened for the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs. The data released today comes from surveys commissioned by ONC and carried out in the course of regular annual surveillance by the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), an agency of HHS’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The AHA survey found that 81 percent of hospitals plan to achieve meaningful use of EHRs and take advantage of incentive payments. About two-thirds of hospitals (65 percent) responded that they will enroll during Stage 1 of the Incentive Programs, in 2011-2012. The NCHS survey found that 41 percent of office-based physicians are currently planning to achieve meaningful use of certified EHR technology and take advantage of the incentive payments. Four-fifths of these, or about a third of all office-based physicians (32.4 percent), responded that they will enroll during Stage 1 of the programs. Only 14 percent of respondents said they were not planning to apply for meaningful use incentives. Additional survey data from NCHS show that significantly increasing numbers of primary care physicians have already adopted a basic EHR, rising by 50 percent from 19.8 percent of primary care physicians in 2008 to 29.6 percent in 2010. Basic EHRs provide a beginning point for use of electronic health records in physician offices, but most physicians would need to further upgrade their EHR systems or their use of the systems in order to qualify for meaningful use incentive payments.