EHR Adoption Rate Slows, With Physicians Facing Big Hurdles For Meeting Stage 2, Survey Finds

The pace of adoption of electronic health-record systems has begun to slow, and the physicians who have adopted systems have a long way to go to meet the government's Stage 2 criteria for meaningful use of the technology, according to an authoritative survey of practices by the National Center for Health Statistics at HHS.

In 2013, the third year of the federal EHR incentive payment program, nearly 8 in 10 office-based physicians had adopted some form of an electronic health-record system and nearly half of them had a “basic” system with key EHR functions defined.

The latest installment of the annual National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, conducted between February and June last year, also showed that most physicians were far from meeting the incentive payment program's Stage 2 “meaningful use” criteria. For physicians who had met at least two years of Stage 1 requirements, Stage 2 got underway Jan. 1.

Dr. Karen DeSalvo, HHS' new national coordinator for health information technology, described the survey results in a blog post as “encouraging.”