EMR Implementation & HITECH Act Blog

Research Shows That Electronic Medical Records Save Babies’ Lives

We talk a lot in this blog about the financial aspects of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), and with good reason – they can entail a substantial investment in time and money.  But it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of the purpose of all that investment – to save lives.

There has been a great deal of research conducted into how much it will cost to implement an EMR, yet there has not been a lot of research into their impact on patient outcomes.    A recent study shows that the adoption of Electronic Medical Records and Radiology Information Systems (RISs) in hospitals in the U.S. actually lowers infant mortality in this country.  Research conducted by Amalia Miller of the University of Virginia and Catherine Ticker of MIT’s Sloan School of Business showed that when hospitals adopt EMRs and RISs, their infant mortality rates drop.

Using data on births and infant mortality already collected by the U.S. Government, and statistics on health care information technology adoption provided by the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the researchers compared infant mortality in selected areas of the country where data was available (privacy laws limited that data pool) with the adoption of EMRs and RISs in those same areas.

After correcting for a wide range of variables, the researchers came to the following conclusions:

• The adoption of EMRs by one additional hospital in a county reduces infant mortality by 13%.
• The average cost of the HIT used to save that baby is about $450,000.
• The reduction of infant mortality is twice as great for African-Americans than non-African-Americans.
• The median cost to implement EMR in a hospital, according to a 2007 America Hospital Association study was $5,556 in capital costs per bed and $12,060 per bed per year in maintenance costs.

The authors studied “bare-bones” HIT implementations of EMRs, and only looked at the impact on neonatal and infant health outcomes.  They suggest that more robust implementations of HIT, including decision-support and computerized physician order entry, as examples, will extend the beneficial effects of HIT to other classes of patients.

This research serves as a gentle reminder that the HITECH Act was intended to provide incentives for physicians and hospitals to implement and use Electronic Medical Records because EMRs will improve patient outcomes and save lives.  This research shows that they do.

Rich Silverman
PC Healthstop Blogging Team

Public Domain Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Posted by PC Healthstop Blogging Team