Since the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT was established in April 2004, it has had the main objective of making a secure network that stems across the whole of the US, which enables authorised users to gain admission to medical records of anyone anywhere in the country 24/7. In 2009, the economic stimulus package distributed $$30 billion to encourage American physicians and hospitals to adopt electronic health records, however today, only 50% of US physicians use even basic EHRs. How is this likely to change in the future? Three drivers will help adoption, a change in marketing from EHR vendors to focus on smaller deals; M&A in the healthcare sector, with EHR contracts from larger providers trickling down onto the smaller acquisition targets; and improving analytics platforms, giving doctors more access to more insightful information.
Since the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT was established in April 2004, it has had the main objective of making a secure network that stems across the whole of the US, which enables authorised users to gain admission to medical records of anyone anywhere in the country 24/7. In 2009, the economic stimulus package distributed $25.9bn to encourage American physicians and hospitals to adopt electronic health records, however today, only 50% of US physicians use even basic EHRs. How is this likely to change in the future? Three drivers will help adoption, a change in marketing from EHR vendors to focus on smaller deals; M&A in the healthcare sector, with EHR contracts from larger providers trickling down onto the smaller acquisition targets; and improving analytics platforms, giving doctors more access to more insightful information.