More Physicians Switch to Electronic Medical Record Use

The recent report “Electronic Medical Record Use by Office-based Physicians and Their Practices: United States, 2007” presents new information from the 2007 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey regarding the growing use of electronic medical records systems by office-based physicians as well as their plans to install new electronic medical record systems within the next 3 years.

Results showed that in 2007 34.8 percent of office-based physicians reported using any electronic medical record system, which represented a 19.2 percent increase since 2006 and a 91.2 percent increase since 2001. A few other findings include the following:

• Physicians in practices with 11 or more physicians were most likely to use either all electronic or partially electronic (part paper and part electronic) systems (74.3 percent), whereas physicians in solo practice were least likely to use electronic medical records systems (20.6 percent).
• Electronic medical record use was higher among physicians in multi-specialty practices (52.5 percent) than in solo or single-specialty practices (30.3 percent).

 The graph below displays electronic medical record use trends from 2001-2007:

For more information, visit the report at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr023.pdf