IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/igg/jhisi0/v1y2006i3p1-23.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Computerization of Primary Care in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • James G. Anderson

    (Purdue University, USA)

  • E. Andrew Balas

    (Old Dominion University, USA)

Abstract

The objective of this study was to assess the current level of information technology use by primary care physicians in the U.S. Primary care physicians listed by the American Medical Association were contacted by e-mail and asked to complete a Web-based questionnaire. A total of 2,145 physicians responded. Overall, between 20% and 25% of primary care physicians reported using electronic medical records, e-prescribing, point-of-care decision support tools, and electronic communication with patients. This indicates a slow rate of adoption since 2000. Differences in adoption rates suggest that future surveys need to differentiate primary care and office-based physicians by specialty. An important finding is that one-third of the physicians surveyed expressed no interest in the four IT applications. Overcoming this barrier may require efforts by medical specialty societies to educate their members in the benefits of IT in practice. The majority of physicians perceived benefits of IT, but they cited costs, vendor inability to deliver acceptable products, and concerns about privacy and confidentiality as major barriers to implementation of IT applications. Overcoming the cost barrier may require that payers and the federal government share the costs of implementing these IT applications.

Suggested Citation

  • James G. Anderson & E. Andrew Balas, 2006. "Computerization of Primary Care in the United States," International Journal of Healthcare Information Systems and Informatics (IJHISI), IGI Global, vol. 1(3), pages 1-23, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:igg:jhisi0:v:1:y:2006:i:3:p:1-23
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://services.igi-global.com/resolvedoi/resolve.aspx?doi=10.4018/jhisi.2006070101
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:igg:jhisi0:v:1:y:2006:i:3:p:1-23. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journal Editor (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.igi-global.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.