I often plug the possibilities of electronic medical records to vastly increase care quality while reducing costs, as they have in the Veteran's Administration System. But I'd be remiss not to point to this recent study showing that, in private practices, using electronic health records resulted in merely minor improvements in only two of the 17 tested metrics. And on one metric, the prescription of statins, they actually worsened physician performance. I don't have full access to the study and so can't tell you what hypotheses the researchers attached to their results, but the data is interesting on its own.
