Adoption of basic electronic health records has increased from nearly 34 percent in early 2011 to 44 percent by March 2012, according to a new study. Former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology David Blumenthal, MD, says that despite the challenges, EHR use is inevitable.

“One reason our health care system is in crisis is that most doctors and hospitals collect and manage health information pretty much the way Hippocrates did 2,400 years ago," Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund (CWF), co-writes in a June 4 blog post. "We have substituted paper for tablet and papyrus, but most everything else is the same."

[See also: Meaningful use penalties could be difficult to avoid in Stage 2, experts say.]

“Locked away in millions of tons of paper on the shelves of doctors' offices and in the basements of hospitals is a vital, untapped resource for improving the health and welfare of Americans,” he writes, along with co-writer Anne-Marie Audet, vice president of health system quality and efficiency at CWF.

Blumenthal and Audet say findings from the study, published in the June 4 edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine, are not a surprise. The meaningful use program, established in 2009 by the HITECH Act, is still a work in progress.

[See also:  Q&A with Mark Savage: Why consumers say MU should not be delayed.]

For the study, Catherine M. Desroches of Mathematica Policy Research – and colleagues from The Commonwealth Fund, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital researchers – surveyed approximately 2,000 primary care physicians and 1,400 specialists on their meaningful use of EHRs. The names were randomly selected from a sample obtained from the American Medical Association from October 2011 to March 2012.

“The results suggest that physicians are still using the EHR as the digital translation of the paper record, mostly to input data,” Blumenthal and Audet write. “Given the scope and complexity of the effort, it’s no surprise the road to full digitalization is challenging.”

Blumenthal and Audet take heart. "Perhaps the most important change has been psychological," they write. "The nation’s doctors increasingly accept that moving into the digital age is inevitable and essential.