Mostashari: Physicians rank EHR satisfaction higher than you might expect

We heard from our healthcare information technology cheerleader-in-chief Dr. Farzad Mostashari on Tuesday that many office-based physicians are, if not deliriously happy with their electronic health-record systems, at least not storming EHR vendor headquarters with flaming torches and pitchforks.

The headline on Mostashari's blog post about a survey report that his Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology commissioned and funded declared that physicians' experiences with EHR adoption were largely positive.

Here are a few of the relevant numbers from the latest survey and data brief by the National Center for Health Statistics:

—47% of office-based docs with an EHR are “somewhat satisfied” with their systems

—38% are "very satisfied"

—10% are "somewhat dissatisfied"

—5% are in the torch-bearing/pitchfork-toting category of "very dissatisfied"

—71% indicated they'd buy their EHR again

Mostashari goes on to say that these happy findings come "in spite of the fact that I often hear from providers who are dissatisfied with their EHR systems." He added: "These providers tell me that that their systems don't work correctly and present significant workflow challenges with little potential to improve patient care. The data released today asks about those concerns and finds, through rigorous, scientific surveying and analysis, a small portion (15%) of those who have adopted EHRs have those concerns."

NCHS researcher Eric Jamoom is the lead author of the latest data brief.

In a telephone interview, I asked him about the dissonance between Mostashari's experience (and, frankly, mine) with hearing physicians grumbling and sniping about their EHRs and the fairly high satisfaction numbers in his data.

"It certainly gives a sense that these physicians are positive about their systems," Jamoom said, but "you do have a subset of physicians who are dissatisfied and you hear from them. I think more research will be done to look at those who are dissatisfied and see what characteristics are associated with that."

That won't include a separate poll of the dissatisfied. "We'll use more (existing) data and look at the characteristics associated with them," he said.

We can expect more information from this second survey report soon, Jamoom said, including data from questions on barriers to use, benefits, perceived impacts, more on satisfaction, training "and a lot of things we didn't get into this data brief."

We'll look forward to that, but I'll have a bit more on this current release in a blog post tomorrow.

Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter: @MHJConn.