Source: Computerworld
Fifteen years ago, if you entered an emergency room a thousand miles from home, the ER doctors would not have had access to potentially lifesaving information in your medical records, such as your allergies or a list of drugs you were taking. Only 10% of US hospitals had electronic health record (EHR) systems, and health record requests were typically sent in paper form by mail or fax machine. Then the federal government stepped in, providing billions of dollars in EHR incentives to help hospitals get online. “Today, 96% of hospitals and 85% of ambulatory providers [and] physician offices use EHRs,” says Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for health IT at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) under the US Department of Health and Human Services.