IT Challenges Facing US Doctors

The Commonwealth Fund released a report this week indicating that while US primary care doctors have made dramatic leaps in EMR adoption, there are still many challenges to be faced.[1] They surveyed doctors from ten different countries on a range of topics including patient access, health information technology, communication, and more. Here are some of the key challenges facing US healthcare:

EMR Adoption
Sixty-nine percent of U.S. primary care physicians have adopted EMRs. While this represents a dramatic rise from the only forty-six percent of U.S. physicians in 2009, the U.S. rate of EMR adoption still lags behind most of the countries surveyed.

Affordability
Most U.S. physicians (59%) reported that their patients struggle to pay for health care. This is dramatically higher than all the other nations.

Multi-functional Capacity
Both U.S. and Canadian physicians have a tendency to use limited function systems. Only 27 percent of U.S. physicians and 10 percent of Candians utilize fully multi-functional systems that can generate patient information from multiple sources such as prescriptions, tests, data for decision making and more.

Timely Information Exchange
One of the big challenges facing U.S. physicians getting timely information from other service providers including information about change of patient medications or patient health care. Actually, this problem appears to be a world wide challenge facing physicians. This lack of access to timely data, overlaps with another challenge listed below.

Interoperability
While the survey results did not include information about interoperability, Healthcare IT leaders recognize the challenge of developing models for improving access and information exchange between various stakeholders in patient care. Even within one healthcare system alone, there are often communication challenges between hardware or software. Expanding this challenge to communication between institutions introduces hardware & software challenges as well as policy and procedure changes.

This report reinforces the challenge for systemwide EMR adoption as well as a greater focus on infrastructure, collaboration, communication and more.

[1] Cathy Schoen, M.S., et al. “A Survey of Primary Care Doctors in Ten Countries Shows Progress in Use of Health Information Technology, Less in Other Areas.” Health Affairs Web, November 16, 2012.