Is lack of EMR and e-prescribing adoption caused by inefficient system design, misaligned incentives, or physician resistance?
The majority of industrialized countries have far greater EHR adoption rates than the United States, despite the fact that their systems are in most cases markedly inferior to U.S. systems. A group from New Zealand visited us recently and said our EHR was significantly superior to their current systems. Despite the lack of highly refined EHRs 95% of their physicians use EHRs for all patient encounters. They could not even imagine practicing medicine on paper. Based on this, one would think that a lack of incentives and/or disincentives for not using EHRs is a big part of the low adoption rate in the US. Competition over EHRs is far greater in this country than anywhere else in the world and our systems have improved dramatically over the past 10 years. Nonetheless, to get our rather demanding physicians over the hump, EHR vendors need to embrace system design principles employed by software designers in other industries. We have invested heavily in a firm that specializes in what is re
