Do Electronic Medical Records Reduce Unnecessary Testing? The Balance of Evidence

Alexander Turchin, MD, MS, Senior Medical Informatician, Quality Performance Management, Partners HealthCare. The presentation combines a review of the existing literature and the presentation of his study: “Bridging the Chasm: Effect of Health Information Exchange on Volume of Laboratory Testing” published in the March 26, 2012, issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, which examined outpatient visits at two affiliated academic hospitals one year before and up to three years after a health information exchange was rolled out. The study looked at 117,606 outpatient encounters at the two hospitals. The encounters occurred in 1999, the year before a health information exchange between them was rolled out, and in the years 2001 – 2004, when the HIE was in operation. After introduction of the HIE, the number of lab tests performed after those encounters that had involved recent off-site lab tests decreased by 49% to 53%.