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By Caren Baginski

If your organization has not yet gone completely electronic (think towering stacks of paper patient records), a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine just might convince you to take the plunge.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore studied 41 Texas hospitals to see if the use of automated medical notes and records, test results, order entry and clinical decision-support systems led to better clinical and financial outcomes for patients.* Conclusion: yes, but by how much?

According to the study, hospitals with clinical information-technology systems saw patient mortality rates decrease by 15 percent and complications drop 16 percent during hospitalization. What a difference automation makes!

This research brought to mind one that the MGMA Center for Research published in 2005 – "Assessing Adoption of Effective Health Information Technology" – which found that only 14.1 percent of the 34,490 group practices surveyed had electronic health records. A tiny number that may hinder President Barack Obama's goal to "make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America's medical records are computerized."

Let's hope we all experience the benefits of going paperless after 2014.


*The nitty gritty: Physicians ranked the hospitals in each category using the Clinical Information Technology Assessment Tool (CITAT). Independent researchers then compared the data against the rates of inpatient mortality, patient complications, patient costs and length of stay for 167,233 patients older than 50 who were admitted to the hospitals in 2005 and 2006.  

Read the whole study at the Archives of Internal Medicine site.  

This blog is missing one thing: your voice. Take a second and leave a comment.  

Caren Baginski is MGMA's Web content writer/editor.

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