News Feature | August 11, 2016

Study: Adopting EHRs Do Not Produce Adverse Outcomes

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

EHR Adoption

Findings reveal no significant change in mortality and adverse safety rates after switches.

While switching to a new EHR can be disruptive and stressful, there is no evidence the process hurts patient outcomes according to a study published by BMJ. Data was collected from 17 U.S. hospitals that went live with EHRs in 2011 or 2012 compared with 399 control hospitals and revealed no significant change in unadjusted 30-day mortality and adverse safety event rates.The study was funded by NIH grants and conducted by researchers from Harvard, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Research found an unadjusted, 30-day mortality of 6.74 percent in the pre-implementation patient sample and 7.15 percent in the post-implementation group, and there was no significant change in mortality for those hospitals implementing a new EHR or moving to a new vendor. Results also found a similar pattern with adverse events, with rates of 10.5 per 1,000 admissions for pre-implementation and 11.4 post-implementation.

The study concluded, “Despite concerns that implementations of EHRs might adversely impact patient care during the acute transition period, we found no overall negative association of such implementation on short term inpatient mortality, adverse safety events, or readmissions in the Medicare population across 17 US hospitals.”

These findings are perhaps good news for supporters of the Health Information Technology for Economics and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which saw substantial federal investment in expanding the adoption of EHRs. The HITECH Act devoted approximately $30 billion to the promotion of EHR adoption through the three stages of Meaningful Use, including incentive payments to those clinicians and hospitals that could certify achievement of MU.

Meanwhile, over half (59 percent) of U.S. hospitals surveyed reported unplanned EHR outages, with one quarter saying it resulted in delayed patient care according to findings from a report issued by the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

The survey further revealed most EHR outages were caused by hardware malfunctions, followed by internet connectivity problems, power failures, and natural disasters. Perhaps surprisingly, hacking or breaches accounted for only 1 percent of outages.