Top EHR Adoption By State – Which States Lead?

The Doctor’s Company, a medical malpractice insurance firm, surveyed 5,105 doctors nationwide about EHR adoption. According to the report, here’s the top 5 states leading EHR adoption:
* 41% EMR Adoption by Oregon’s Physicians
* 39% EMR Adoption by Georgia’s Physicians
* 37% EMR Adoption by Florida’s Physicians
* 35% EMR Adoption by Washington’s Physicians
* 34% EMR Adoption by Virgina’s Physicians

Another interesting stat from the study said that 17% of doctors surveyed said they had no plans to use an EHR in their practice.

I’m sure we could talk about ~5,000 doctors not being a representative sample for 50 states, but the numbers are interesting. I think it’s also worth noting that the highest EHR adoption they found for a state was 41%. So much for all those people who say that EHR adoption has topped 50%. I still put it at the 25-30% range for overall EHR adoption.

I think it would be interesting to do a little digging and see how good the HIE efforts are in each of these states that have higher EHR adoption. While EHR isn’t an absolute pre-requisite for an HIE, it is in my book.

The 17% of doctors not wanting to adopt an EHR isn’t that surprising. In fact, I could have imagined it higher. Although, that’s going to change over the next 5 years. Sure, there will always be that 5% that won’t change, but most of the rest won’t have much choice.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • How many patients are currently being treated by EMR or EHR systems?…

    One way to look at this is to consider what percentage of doctors use an EMR or EHR system. This is a hard question to answer since most EHR vendors don’t give out their numbers and when they do they’re often inflated by something. For example, ONC l…

  • Hi John,
    This report was based on 5,105 surveys returned by doctors nationwide in all 50 states and D.C. The EMR implementation rates in the top five states (OR; GA; FL; WA; VA) ranged from 34% to 41%. State sampling variations and the predominance of specialist respondents (69%) over PCPs (31%) may well have under counted EMR adoption rates in some of the states.

    An EMR implementation survey in Rhode Island offers one example. In early 2012, the Rhode Island Department of Health administered its annual Physician HIT Survey to 3,546 physicians in active practice, licensed in Rhode Island and located in Rhode Island, Connecticut, or Massachusetts. The response rate was 55.4% (n=1,964) and of those 1,964 respondents, 86.2% already had an EMR.

    I was not able to find a complete list of state implementation rates in the Doctors Company survey link, but Rhode Island was not on the list of top ten states.

    See: http://www.thedoctors.com/ecm/groups/public/@tdc/@web/documents/web_content/con_id_004676.pdf

  • Dr. Coli,
    As has been aptly illustrated in the current economic environment, there are a lot of ways to mess with surveys and get different results. I wish we had a better way to get better data on this.

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