UCSF: Hospital Quality Improves Over Time with EHRs, Study Finds

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The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) News Center posted an article, "Hospital Quality Improves Over Time with EHRs, Study Finds," about research on the impact of hospital electronic health records (EHRs) adoption that was published in Health Affairs.

The study, by researchers at UC San Francisco, the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the University of Michigan, on patients aged 65 and older, was funded by The John A. Hartford Foundation. The team examined "how the adoption of EHRs affected the quality of hospital care between 2008 and 2013 found that mortality rates were initially higher among hospitals with more digital capabilities, but fell over time, as hospitals learned how to work with the technology and adopted new capabilities."

"All hospitals did not see equal benefits from digitization, however, and the trend was driven mainly by smaller and non-teaching hospitals."

“Hospitals implement functionality over time, because it’s really hard to go from fully paper to fully electronic overnight,” Dr. Adler-Milstein said. “We measured EHR adoption in a way that was truer to the way adoption likely occurred. As hospitals added functionalities over time, there was benefit from each of those new features.”


To read the post, click here.
To go to the Health Affairs paper, click here.
To learn about JAHF's funding, click here.