When Governments Nudge Physicians to Use EMRs

Physicians have been, at best, slow to adopt electronic medical records. But who can blame them? These computerized systems often cost lots of money, and force physicians to spend gobs of valuable time learning a new way to track how they care for patients. On the other hand, we would all be better off if more physicians used EMRs. So to get things moving along, the U.S. Congress started giving physicians financial incentives to adopt these computerized records into their practices, starting in 2008. And evidence is that this had a big effect:

Sometimes people need a little push to do the right thing.