Relationship Between Use of Electronic Health Record Features and Health Care Quality

Abstract

Consistent with past studies, there was no significant relationship between use of EHR as a binary factor and performance on quality measures. However, availability and use of specific EHR features by primary care physicians was associated with higher performance on certain quality measures. These results suggest that, to maximize health care quality, developers, implementers and certifiers of EHRs should focus on increasing the adoption of robust EHR systems and increasing the use of specific features rather than simply aiming to deploy an EHR regardless of functionality.