A new survey of American hospitals has found that relatively few of them – between 2 percent and 12 percent -- use electronic health records.

That surprising news was delivered to the American Health Information Community today by Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard University School of Public Health and Catherine DesRoches of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Policy.

"This is somewhat sobering," Jha said, but he noted that more than three-quarters of the hospitals have some electronic patient records. "I do think we've got a good start" on automating hospitals' medical record-keeping, he added.

The news came during the AHIC's final meeting. Formed in 2005 as a Health and Human Services Department advisory committee, it has brought factions in the health care industry together to forge a consensus on advancing health IT.

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, who created the AHIC, and other leaders congratulated one another on the committee's accomplishments, including its work with the Health IT Standards Panel and the Certification Commission for Health IT.

The hospital IT adoption survey, done this year in conjunction with the American Hospital Association, got responses from more than 3,000 U.S. non-federal hospitals, one of the largest samples ever, DesRoches said.

With the help of an expert panel, the researchers defined a comprehensive hospital EHR, which they decided comprised 24 functions such as ordering laboratory tests and recording discharge summaries. The survey found only 1.7 percent of hospitals had comprehensive systems at work in all hospital departments.

Jha told the AHIC that if federal hospitals, with their advanced systems, had been included, that number would have increased to 4 percent.

The researchers also defined two smaller sets of functions, which they labeled basic EHRs, and determined that as many as 12 percent of hospitals had a minimal basic EHR at work in at least one department.

However, as many as 78 percent of hospitals had certain functions on the list, such as recording patient demographics or viewing results of lab tests. "They just haven't put the pieces together" to create a comprehensive EHR, Jha said.

He said e-prescribing is the biggest hurdle facing most hospitals at this time. They cited cost as a major barrier.

Leavitt expressed disappointment at the way the data was presented to the AHIC. "It belies the actual progress to simply measure those who have arrived" at the goal of comprehensive EHRs, he said.

Jha said that in many cases the hospitals have laid the foundations for more automation and can now move ahead with implementation.