It is difficult to find consistent percentages when researching physician EHR adoption rates. Many EHR vendors have their own statistics and they vary by study.

According to Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, since 2008, office-based physician adoption of an EHR has nearly doubled, from 42% to 87%.

According to SK&A a leading provider of U.S. healthcare reference information (they were acquired by IMS Health and then merged with Quintiles in October 2016) physician specialties with the highest adoption rates are internal medicine and pediatrics (76%), nephrology (75%), family practice (75%) and urology (74%).

According to the CDCs National Center for Health Statistics in 2016:
• Percent of office-based physicians using any EMR/EHR system: 86.9%
• Percent of office-based physicians with a basic system: 53.9%

it is difficult to ascertain the exact percentages, but what seems to be clear, is that there has been an increase in EHR adoption rates of office based physicians in the last several years. The Medicare financial incentives have ended but Medicaid incentives still exist for office based physicians. Likely adoption has completed the big wave. Solo and small practices that haven’t adopted yet will have to do so if they want to receive incentives under MACRA, which requires some level of certified EHRs. The next incentives/penalties as noted are in MACRA/MIPS but in 2017 it appears that many practices are minimizing their efforts in 2017.

My next article will be a review of hospital EHRs and their vendors. Here are the percentages associated with their adoption:

According to SK&A, in March 2017, 67% of all providers reported using an EHR with the following
EHR Adoption Rates from 2012-2017
Year EHR Adoption Rate
2012 40%
2013 48%
2014 50%
2015 63%
2016 66%
2017 67%