Echoing Paul Cerrato’s post on EHRs and Pay For Performance, which cites a study by Jonathan Weiner, et. al., at Johns Hopkins University titled New Paradigms for Measuring Clinical Performance Using Electronic Health Records, there are many shortcomings in current EHR support for a shift to Pay For Performance (P4P). Cerrato particularly calls out statistics showing very small fractions of ambulatory care encounters fully documented in EHRs and interoperable across providers – necessary to meaningfully impact quality of care across provider organizations.
There are two issues at work here: the capture and the use of data. When two provider EHRs cannot adequately share data for a single patient, this is an issue of the usage of the data. If the data cannot be effectively used across provider organizations, there is little chance of using the EHRs to drive improved quality, and thus succeeding at P4P. Continue reading