From Health Affairs:
“While prior national research has shown that rural providers have introduced health IT at the same, or greater, rates than their urban counterparts, a new study, being released as a Web First byHealth Affairs, found dramatic variations among rural providers, ranging from 91.0 percent for podiatrists to 9.5 percent for dentists. The author, Dawn M. Heisey-Grove, obtained the meaningful-use achievement data from the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records Incentive Programs between 2011 and 2014, which contained information from 548,961 providers and hospitals.“
Interesting to see the differences in adoption rates between urban and rural providers. What most of us will be most surprised to see is that the rural hospitals typically have higher adoption rates than their big city counterparts, attributed to Meaningful Use incentives.
It would also be interesting to see how rural providers use their IT applications — do they have more time to devote to learning and optimizing their workflow than an urban hospital?
