Most financially strapped hospitals regret pricey electronic health record purchases, Black Book says

Four years after what Black Book called the "replacement frenzy," a recent survey from the market research firm has found that that 87 percent of financially struggling hospitals now regret changing their EHR systems due to higher than expected costs, layoffs, declining inpatient revenues, disenfranchised clinicians and doubts over the benefits of switching systems.

The survey, which polled 1,204 hospital executives and 2,133 information technology staff users, found that 14 percent of all hospitals that replaced their original EHR since 2011 were losing inpatient revenue at a pace that wouldn't support the total cost of their replacement EHR.

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"It was a risky decision as hospitals were facing the fact that they would not be back to their pre-EHR implementation patient volumes, inpatient or ambulatory, for at least another five years," said Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book, in a statement.

"No other industry spends so much per unit of IT on the part of the business that is shrinking the fastest and holds little growth as did inpatient revenues," he said.

Black Book also found 62 percent of non-managerial IT staff saw significantly negative impact on healthcare delivery directly attributable to the EHR replacement initiative. Also, 90 percent of nurses said the EHR process changes diminished their ability to deliver hands-on care at the same effectiveness, yet only 5 percent of hospital leaders indicated EHR replacement had impacted care in a negative way.

[Also: Report: Financial incentives driving rollout of electronic health records]

"In our experience polling, most executives will not admit they were oversold or that their IT decisions had adverse bearing on patient care," Brown noted.

Black Book also found that hospital EHR replacements cost jobs, and levels of interoperability decreased. Also, EHR sales people exaggerated the automatic buy-in of physicians and other clinicians, according to Black Book findings.

Twitter: @Bernie_HITN