Hospital adoption of electronic health records has taken a leap over the past year, but interoperability is still a significant obstacle, according to survey released Thursday by the Optum Institute.

The Optum Institute found nearly nine out of 10 hospitals surveyed (87 percent) now have EMR systems in place. This is up significantly since 2011, when the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) reported that only slightly more than half of CIOs had a fully operational electronic health record in at least one facility in their organization.

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According to the new Optum survey, 70 percent of CIOs report their systems have attested to meaningful use 1 criteria (MU1) and 75 percent anticipated being able to meet expected meaningful use Stage 2 (MU2) criteria by 2014.

However, after huge investments made by healthcare organizations to adopt system-wide electronic health records, hospital CIOs are still concerned about growing costs and burdens related to lack of interoperability between systems, and incomplete data available through health information exchanges, said Carol Simon, director of the Optum Institute.

Without interoperability, the broader hope of bundling payments and improving population health will be difficult to achieve, Simon told Healthcare IT News. “Interoperability is the litmus test to managing broader patient care and sustainability on the cost side,” she said.

Meaningful use incentives have definitely driven community hospital adoption of EHRs in the past year, said Simon. “For smaller organizations, the incentives have been beneficial,” she said.

But, meaningful use incentives are still in the “carrot” phase. On the stick side of it, after 2015, hospitals that aren’t able to report required data would face a “non-trivial” financial impact. “The concern is, they may be able to meet meaningful use criteria, but they won’t have the capacity to manage population health.”

Simon said the survey and the discussion the Institute hopes to generate comes at a critical juncture, with the anticipated release of meaningful use Stage 2 regulations sometime in the next week. “It’s a good time to have this conversation, before meaningful use Stage 2 is finalized,” she said. “The rollout on payment initiatives is still in flux. That’s why we’re asking these questions now.”

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The Optum Institute's new survey, taken of 301 hospitals is the most current snapshot to date of hospital EHR adoption and is representative of community hospitals nationwide, said Simon. “We’ve gone through statistical pains to make sure we’ve covered the waterfront, by hospital size and type,” she said. The Institute plans to release findings from a physician EHR adoption survey within the next four to six weeks.

Find the entire Optum Institute survey results here.

Follow Diana Manos on Twitter @DManos_IT_News.