Doctors fall short of meeting standards in gov't push for electronic health records

New research shows that most physicians are not meeting the federal "meaningful use" criteria for electronic health records.

Bloomberg: Most Doctors Don't Meet U.S. Push For Electronic Records
Fewer than 1 in 10 doctors used electronic records last year to U.S. standards, according to a survey that shows the challenge facing a multibillion-dollar effort to digitize the health system for improved patient care. Only 9.8 percent of 1,820 primary-care and specialty doctors said they had electronic systems that met U.S. rules for "meaningful use," a list of tasks such as tracking referrals or filling prescriptions online (Nussbaum, 6/4).

Medscape: Few Physicians Meet Meaningful Use Criteria For EHR
By early 2012, few physicians had met meaningful use criteria for electronic health records (EHRs), according to a survey study by Catherine M. DesRoches, DrPH, from Mathematica Policy Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues, published online June 3 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Furthermore, those who did meet criteria had difficulty using computerized systems for panel management tasks (Barclay, 6/3).

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Marketplace: A Health Datapalooza: Washington And Private Health Care's Quest To Mine Health Data
We've all heard of the summer rock festival Lollapalooza. But how about Health Datapalooza? For two days this week, nearly 2,000 data geeks, entrepreneurs, federal bureaucrats and medical folks will descend on Washington, D.C., hoping to help solve the nation's healthcare crisis through algorithms and spreadsheets. The health data industry has been called a "health care Silicon Valley" -- an explosion of firms looking for gold in mountains of medical information (Gorenstein, 6/3).