More Medical Records Go Electronic

Almost one in four doctors partially or fully uses electronic record-keeping, according to new statistics from the Centers for Disease Control.

This new information comes in CDC's National Center for Health Statistics' report, released Friday, on the increasing trend of electronic record-keeping in the medical field. Meanwhile, the Institute of Medicine said in a report released Thursday that all prescriptions should be written electronically by 2010. The Institute also announced that a patient is subject to, on average, at least one medication error per day while hospitalized.

Other findings in the CDC report reveal that:

The increase in physicians using electronic medical records (EMRs) increased 31 percent from 2001 to 2005.

Doctors in the Midwest and West were more likely to keep electronic medical records than their counterparts in the Northeast.

Physicians in metropolitan areas were more likely to use EMRs than those in non-metropolitan areas.