Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

Mergers and acquisitions not leading to promised EHR integration

Healthcare IT News: Improved information-sharing through electronic health record integration is often cited as a benefit of hospital mergers, but a new analysis published on the Health Affairs Blog suggests that sales pitch should be met with "healthy skepticism."

The study by Harvard Business School doctoral student A. Jay Holmgren and renowned healthcare IT researcher Julia Adler-Milstein, which used data from 4,720 hospitals from the American Hospital Association survey and IT Supplement from 2012 to 2016, finds that only one-third of hospitals acquired in that period switched to the dominant vendor of their acquiring system, while 44 percent remained on a different EHR system.

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