Study: Advanced EHRs don't boost quality

Hospitals with basic electronic health records (EHRs) demonstrated a significantly greater increase in quality of care for patients being treated for heart failure, but similar gains were not found in hospitals that upgraded to advanced electronic health records, according to the RAND Corp.

Furthermore, researchers found hospitals with EHRs did not have higher quality care among patients treated for heart attack or pneumonia.

Their findings, published online by the American Journal of Managed Care, is one of the first to look at a broad set of hospitals to examine the impact that adopting EHRs has had on the quality of care. The study included 2,021 hospitals-about half of the nonfederal acute care hospitals nationally.