By Jacob Goldstein

Remember that survey last year that found only 17% percent of U.S. doctors have electronic health records? Turns out, the figure’s even lower for hospitals.

In all, about 9% of hospitals have EHRs, according to a survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Only 1.5% of U.S. hospitals have adopted “comprehensive” EHRs — those with a complete set of bells and whistles, installed throughout the hospital. Another 7.6% have basic systems installed in at least part of the hospital.

For both docs and hospitals, the main barrier to adoption was the same: Cost. That augurs well for the great big pile of cash the feds will be handing out in a few years to encourage everybody to get with the EHR program.

The federal money should be worth about $6 million over several years for a midsized hospital, according to an expert cited by the WSJ. That will cover a decent chunk of the cost of getting an electronic records system, which runs about $10 million, the WSJ says. But the stimulus incentives should

The survey, funded by the feds and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is brought to you by the same researchers who did the EHR docs survey. One of the authors — Harvard Prof. David Blumenthal — was recently named as the feds’ health IT chief.

Above article published on http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/03/26/docs-hospitals-skip-electronic-records-for-the-same-reason/