According to an independent national survey of ambulatory surgery center administrators, 82 percent of ASCs do not use an electronic health record.

The study, conducted by Renaissance Research of Edwardsville, Ill., discovered that 85 percent of ASCs use paper perioperative notes, and 74 percent use dictation and transcription for the generation of physician procedure notes.

Renaissance Research conducted the survey by telephone interviews between Feb. 29 and March 12. The firm interviewed 175 ASC administrators, providing a margin of error of +/- 7 percentage points.

Wolters Kluwer Health, a Minneapolis-based provider of electronic procedure documentation and patient charting technology, commissioned the survey.

Forty-three percent of the ASC administrators interviewed by Renaissance Research cited the following as obstacles to electronically streamlining procedure documentation:

• lack of interface with scheduling software and other existing systems;

• lack of capital investment;

• lack of software that will capture their patient mix;

• and lack of personnel to implement a new system.