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Accelerating U.S. EHR Adoption: How to Get There From Here. Recommendations Based on the 2004 ACMI Retreat

Affiliations of the authors: Clinical Informatics Research & Development, Center for IT Leadership, Partners HealthCare System and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (BM); Department of Community and Family Medicine and Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC (WEH); School of Nursing and College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI (PFB); Center for Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (GFC).

Correspondence and reprints: Blackford Middleton, MD, MPH, MSc, Clinical Informatics Research & Development, Partners HealthCare, 93 Worcester Street, PO Box 81905, Wellesley, MA 02481; e-mail: <bmiddleton1{at}partners.org>.

Received for publication: 08/09/04; accepted for publication: 09/22/04.

Abstract

Despite growing support for the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) to improve U.S. healthcare delivery, EHR adoption in the United States is slow to date due to a fundamental failure of the healthcare information technology marketplace. Reasons for the slow adoption of healthcare information technology include a misalignment of incentives, limited purchasing power among providers, variability in the viability of EHR products and companies, and limited demonstrated value of EHRs in practice. At the 2004 American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) Retreat, attendees discussed the current state of EHR adoption in this country and identified steps that could be taken to stimulate adoption. In this paper, based upon the ACMI retreat, and building upon the experiences of the authors developing EHR in academic and commercial settings we identify a set of recommendations to stimulate adoption of EHR, including financial incentives, promotion of EHR standards, enabling policy, and educational, marketing, and supporting activities for both the provider community and healthcare consumers.

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