Will electronic health records improve healthcare quality? Challenges and future prospects

摘要

Health information technology has been widely touted as a key component to improving healthcare delivery along the six components of quality identified by the Institute of Medicine: effectiveness, efficiency, safety, timeliness, patient-centeredness and equity [1,2]. Owing to health information technology's potential, many national governments have policies designed to promote the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs). In the USA alone, the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act allocated billions of dollars to promote widespread adoption and use of certified EHRs among individual clinicians and hospitals. Despite these efforts, there are many documented barriers to widespread EHR use [3,4], including the absence of robust evidence guaranteeing that the benefits of EHRs will be realized systemwide.