The HHS Office of the National Health Coordinator for Health Information Technology awarded a three-year cooperative agreement Sept. 29 to the American Board of Family Medicine as part of a new initiative to measure use and potential burdens physicians experience with health IT.
Through the initiative, the office will gather data from physicians across the U.S. on how they use health IT, including key measures on burden and interoperability.
The effort stems from research in 2017 that found about 80 percent of office-based physicians used an EHR system, but only 10 percent of those physicians reported being able to electronically send, receive, find and integrate health data from EHRs outside of their networks.
Under the agreement, the American Board of Family Medicine will create key measures for health IT use and interoperability, gather data from a nationally representative sample and work with ONC to analyze and interpret survey results. ONC said it aims to use the analysis to inform policy decisions.