The broken promise of digitizing patient data
Physicians Practice December 1, 2022
Digitizing patient health data was supposed to make it usable for public and population health research. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Between 2011 and 2015 the government spent upwards of $35 billion subsidizing doctors’ purchases of electronic health records (EHRs) through the Meaningful Use program. It did so mainly in the expectation that EHRs would enable doctors to provide better care for patients and streamline practice and hospital workflows.
But the 2009 Health Information Technology for Clinical Health (HITECH) Act — the law that spawned Meaningful Use — included an additional motive for encouraging EHR use: advancing public and population health. The hope was that digitizing millions of patient health records would produce a treasure-trove of data that researchers could...