Federal Intervention Needed For Lagging Psychiatric Hospitals to Adopt EHRs
May 9, 2018 | Strategic Insights for Health System
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A May 3, 2018, opinion article in The New England Journal ofMedicine asks, as the federal government rolls out broad efforts to improve care for Americans with psychiatric illnesses, what is being done to increase the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) in psychiatric care? Psychiatric hospitals lag far behind other healthcare organizations when it comes to adopting EHRs, according to the article's authors. An infographic in the article shows that only 15% of nonfederal psychiatric hospitals had adopted an EHR in 2015, compared with 84% of nonfederal general medicine hospitals. This means psychiatric care providers often don't have access to a patient's health care information and cannot coordinate a patient's care with other healthcare providers through an EHR, the authors say.