The best available evidence suggests that about a quarter of physicians were using an electronic health record as of 2005, but fewer than one in ten physicians were using EHRs with functionalities such as electronic prescribing, researchers say in an article published today on the Health Affairs Web site. The article by Harvard's Ashish Jha and coauthors offers this and other key findings from the first report of the Health Information Technology Adoption Initiative, a partnership between the federal government and several academic research institutions. The initiative's mission is to track the adoption of EHRs by both physicians and hospitals, and the research by Jha's team is meant to create a "reliable baseline" against which progress can be measured.

Medicare pays hospitals an extra $300 million-plus a year for just five types of adverse events occurring during hospitalization, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Chanliu Zhan and coauthors report in the Sep/Oct Health Affairs. This amounts to 0.27 percent of annual Medicare hospital spending, but it represents less than a third of the additional costs incurred by hospitals in treating these adverse events. Thus, there are good business cases for both Medicare and hospitals to improve patient safety, the authors say. They agree with the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission that Medicare should pay only for comorbid conditions that were present at admission, not for adverse events that occur during hospitalization.

We are pleased to announce that after 25 years as a bimonthly print journal and six years in online publishing, Health Affairs is entering the blogosphere as a new means of engaging readers in the health policy debate. The blog launched on October 5 with a post by the University of California at Berkeley's James Robinson focusing on "Redefining Health Care," a new book on health care reform by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Olmstead Teisberg. In the coming week, other health policy experts will offer posts on the book, and the blog will tackle biotech pricing and many other subjects. We encourage everyone to join the discussion - we ask only that you register and use your real name. Readers who wish to be informed about new postings may sign up for e-mail alerts or an RSS feed.