The inclusion of social and behavioral health domains in EHRs is vital to providing crucial information to providers treating individual patients, to health systems concerned about the health of populations and to researchers involved in determining the effectiveness of treatment, according to a study from the Institute of Medicine.

Patients weigh in on the good, bad and ugly of EMRs, tackling whether they are mostly instruments to maximize patient billings, whether they interfere with physician-patient interactions and how they improve care coordination.

Sixty percent of those who responded to an EHR governance study have a formalized EHR governance structure in place.

CHICAGO--In a presentation at the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society’s 2014 Symposium on Human Factors in Healthcare, Abel Kho, MD, MS, presented an update on the successful adoption of and challenges to implementing EHRs across the different regions of the country and locally in Chicago, as well as current rates of Meaningful Use attestation.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued a report that includes recommendations for developers and outpatient care centers to better integrate EHRs into clinical workflow.

Late-adopting primary care physicians may succeed at meeting requirements for downloading personal health information in Meaningful Use Stage 2, but specialists may struggle with achieving required thresholds, according to a study in the American Journal of Medical Quality.

A new position statement from the American Health Information Management Association warns industry stakeholders about the risky practice of copy and pasting within an EHR because that "can result in redundant, erroneous and/or incomprehensible health record documentation."

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has made corrections regarding four certification criteria to its proposed rule for the voluntary 2015 Edition of EHR technology certification criteria.