Despite seeming to much of the outside world as being a fairly rudimentary technology, electronic health records are still struggling to achieve widespread adoption in the health industry.  Doctors aren’t the strongest advocates, and a recent survey from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) suggests that providers that have adopted the technology still often fail to adhere to the voluntary guidelines established by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), despite having four years to do so.

“Less than 20 percent of the recommendations were fully implemented across all the organizations,” the researchers explain.

The guidelines, known as the Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) consist of around 140 recommendations across nine separate guides.  The researchers quizzed a number of healthcare organizations in both the United States and Australia to try and understand whether they were adhering to them or not.

Safe usage

The guidelines are split into three main sections, and there was a clear divide in terms of which of these had received the most takeup.  The recommendations on safe health IT were the most commonly adhered to, whereas the ‘monitoring health IT’ was the least.

“This is not surprising because the domains were conceived as sequential building blocks,” the researchers say. “The safe health IT domain contains many recommendations required for e-health record system certification.”

The ‘safe health IT’ is a decent start however, as they contain recommendations such as ensuring that data and application configurations are backed up and hardware systems are redundant.

It should be said that they didn’t analyze why adherence rates varied, nor indeed what the impact of non-adherence was, but on the basis that they believe the guidelines are still important, they hope that the results can be used to help healthcare organizations benchmark their progress towards safe use of electronic health record systems.