A new review of data conducted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has found that small providers reap many benefits from adopting electronic health records systems, according to Government Health IT.
The study confronts recent investigations that questioned the actual benefits of electronic health records and other aspects of health IT, including one published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found many providers are not implementing their systems effectively. While these studies found little upside to using the technology, the new research paints a much different picture.
After surveying 154 previously published studies on electronic health records, the National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal found that 92 percent of the studies indicated positive outcomes, particularly for smaller providers.
Blumenthal said that one of the main reasons for the discrepancy between his results and those of more negative studies is that his looked at more recent data, while other investigations examined older, less relevant information.
"Two salient aspects of this more recent synthesis is that it brings the literature up to date and extends it beyond the few large systems that were the source of most information on the," he told the news source.