Hospital executives aren't just worried about having their own organizations meet the federal government's meaningful use requirements; they're also concerned about their affiliated and owned doctor practices achieving the goals. In fact, many hospitals are assisting (or plan to help) doctors to get on board with e-health records even as those hospitals struggle with their own projects.A recent CSC survey of 60 hospital executives found that having their organizations help community doctors achieve meaningful use of an ambulatory e-health record was among the top three priorities of 86% of the respondents in the near term.

The 60 healthcare executives responding to the survey included about half CIOs and other IT leaders, and half operational executives, including CEOs, CFOs and COOs. The executives were from a mix of large multi-hospital health systems, single academic medical centers, and stand alone non-academic hospitals.

CSC's survey found that hospitals are taking several different approaches to helping their community physicians achieve meaningful use.

Sixty-three percent of the healthcare executives said their organizations are providing community doctors access to the hospitals' enterprise EHR, or plan to do so; 39% have teams that are helping doctors select and implement an EHR; 33% are offering financial subsidies for physicians to purchase EHR systems; and 64% are either offering doctors a hosted ambulatory EHR or plan to do so.

CSC's survey findings also jive with what InformationWeek has found in its own ongoing reporting: that some hospitals already have made big strides in rolling out programs that assist their network of owned or affiliated doctors to adopt digital health record systems.

In fact, our premier issue of InformationWeek Healthcare released this week shines a spotlight on how four large hospitals are helping doctor practices jump-start their e-health efforts.

Take a look at the full special InformationWeek Healthcare digital issue--which includes an interview with national health IT czar Dr. David Blumenthal, as well as guest columns by a couple of very well-known and respected healthcare CIOs by clicking here.

In the meantime, tell us what meaningful efforts you've got underway to get your clinicians using health IT.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on this year's Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference. This report offers the best healthcare IT advice, insight, and analysis coming out of that conference. Download the report here (registration required).