The majority of US hospitals are in the early stages of EMR transformation. Currently 19 percent of US hospitals have not achieved Stage 1 and are at Stage 0, 21 percent have achieved Stage 1, 50 percent have achieved stage 2, approximately eight percent have achieved stage 3, approximately two percent percent have achieved Stage 4, and less than one percent of hospitals have achieved stage 5 and stage 6 (see Figure 3).
There are a total of 754 acute care hospitals that have not fully implemented a base of major clinical ancillary department applications (e.g., laboratory, pharmacy, radiology) to qualify for stage 1 designation. This represents approximately 19 percent of the hospitals in the database. Most hospitals occupy the stage 1 and stage 2 levels of the EMR Adoption Model. The combined percentage of hospitals in these two stages is approximately 71 percent. At this time, there are only 414 US hospitals that are stage 3-6 of the EMR Adoption Model. This shows the tremendous amount of work and investment that must be done by US hospitals to implement clinical systems to enable their participation in EHR initiatives. More importantly, further implementation of higher stage EMR applications will enable the reduction or elimination of medical errors, while providing the digital environment . The higher stages of the model represent the facilitation of not only improved patient care, but also improvements in efficiency and effectiveness with which patient care services are delivered by clinicians. Once we begin to deliver these capabilities within the healthcare organizations, we can begin to focus on sharing patient care information among all of the healthcare stakeholders. Currently, the hype surrounding healthcare IT has the cart before the horse. How can we discuss the potential of EHRs, much less implement them, until we have implemented effective EMRs, not only in hospitals, but in all care delivery organizations including physician practices?
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