EHRs hinder ability to report quality measures

Editor's Note

The poor design of electronic health records (EHRs) poses challenges for primary care practices to generate the required reports for federal value-based payment programs, this study finds.

An analysis of survey responses from 1,492 practices in 12 states, found that the reports generated for meaningful-use participation, which requires the use of federally certified EHR technology, did not always support quality improvement initiatives.

Clinicians also reported many challenges in generating adequate reports, such as:

• difficulty aligning measurement time frames with quality improvement needs
• a lack of functionality for generating reports on clinical quality measures
• discordance between clinical guidelines and measures that are available in reports
• questionable quality of data
• vendors unreceptive to changing EHR configurations beyond federal requirements.

Current EHR measurement functionality may be insufficient to support federal initiatives that tie payment to clinical quality measures, the authors say.