Physician use of outpatient electronic health records to improve care.

We applied a model of usage categories of electronic health records for outpatient physicians to a large population of physicians, using an established electronic health record. This model categorizes physician users according to how extensively they adopt the various capabilities of electronic health records. We identified representative indicators from usage statistics for outpatient physician use of the HELP-2 outpatient electronic medical record, in use at Intermountain Healthcare. Using these indicators, we calculated the relative proportion of users in each category. These proportions are useful for predicting the expected benefits of electronic health record adoption.