News Feature | August 20, 2014

EMR Adoption Reduces Mortality Rates

Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Your Healthcare IT Patients’ Conditions Could Influence How They Access Health Data

A recent HIMSS study reveals hospitals that have implemented EMRs can better predict and decrease mortality rates.

HIMSS Analytics and Healthgrades recently released EMR Effectiveness: The Positive Benefit Electronic Medical Record Adoption has on Mortality Rates, a whitepaper analyzing the effects of electronic medical record (EMR) implementation on predicting and decreasing mortality rates. The study set out to specifically answer the following questions:

  • Is there a relationship between the level of adoption of electronic medical records and hospital performance?
  • What aspect of that performance is related most strongly to the adoption?
  • Are there certain clinical areas (defined by the Healthgrades mortality - based cohorts) where this relationship is stronger or weaker?
  • What additional variables, if any are related to the adoption level?

According to Fierce EMR, researchers used data from more than 4,500 acute-care facilities on 32 different procedures and condition-based clinical groups. Then, a predicted mortality rate for each procedure was determined and compared it to the actual mortality rate to see if a hospital performed better or worse than expected. This was also compared it to each hospital's level of EHR adoption, using HIMSS' Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM).

It was found hospitals with more advanced EHR systems were better able to predict mortality rates for most conditions.

Researchers concluded, “The findings of this seminal study are highly encouraging to those seeking evidence supportive of the clinical benefits of the EMR. Improvements in the predicted mortality rate indicate that hospitals with advanced EMR capabilities are able to capture more information about the patient. This improved data capture involving the patient’s co-morbidities and other risks allow clinicians to better manage patients seen in the hospital, resulting in more positive predicted clinical outcomes.

“That the relationship between EMR capabilities and decreased actually mortality rates was not universal, suggests other forces not considered in this study may be at play. Organizational culture and process issues come top of mind underscoring the argument that having advanced technologies in place is not necessarily synonymous with high quality patient care,” says HIMSS. “Yet, these findings do support the argument that investments in a robust EMR infrastructure are conducive to yielding clinical benefits. Given the complex nature of this topic, further studies exploring the relationship between EMRAM scores and various clinical outcomes are warranted and will add greatly to the industry’s understanding of the clinical effectiveness of EMRs.”

Download the report HERE