By Sasha TerMaat

At the end of November 2017, JAMIA published the article, “Are all certified EHRs created equal? Assessing the relationship between EHR vendor and hospital meaningful use performance.” The authors, A Jay Holmgren, Julia Adler-Milstein, and Jeffrey McCullough, performed a statistical analysis of publicly available data sets on Meaningful Use EHR Incentive Program performance, stratifying based on the developer of the EHR product used by the Meaningful Use participant.

It’s wonderful to see the data sets published by CMS and ONC used for insightful research. I know from personal experience doing data analysis of CMS and ONC published data sets that a lot of effort goes into data normalization, and the authors took a thoughtful and careful approach.

However, I was surprised by the authors’ conclusions and policy recommendations at the close of the article. Having found EHR developer-correlated variability in performance on certain activities measured in the Meaningful Use incentive program, the authors state that is undesirable, and write recommendations to standardize. The authors say, “Our results suggest that policy-makers should pursue modifications to the EHR certification process to decrease such variation across EHR vendors and improve EHR systems.” (more…)