More than three-quarters of nonfederal acute care hospitals had an EHR system in 2014, an eight-fold increase from six years earlier, according to an Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology report released on April 16.
The hospital adoption rates were 9.4 percent in 2008, 12.2 percent in 2009, 15.6 percent in 2010, 27.6 percent in 2011, 44.4 percent in 2012, 59.4 percent in 2013 and 75.5 percent in 2014.
In each state, at least half of hospitals had adopted an EHR last year. The highest adoption rates occurred in Delaware (100 percent), South Dakota (95 percent) and Virginia (93 percent), while the lowest rates occurred in West Virginia (50 percent), Hawaii (55 percent) and Kansas (60 percent). By comparison, Connecticut and New Mexico were the only two states in 2008 with EHR adoption above 20 percent.
The report also found 97 percent of acute care hospitals had EHR technology certified to meet federal requirements and should be eligible to meet EHR incentive program objectives.
The authors defined nonfederal acute care hospitals as acute care general medical and surgical, general children’s and cancer hospitals owned by private/not-for-profit, investor-owned/for-profit and state/local government hospitals in the 50 states and District of Columbia.
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.