Reuters reports that a newly issued study of 1.8 million doctors office visits occurring in 2003 and 2004 concludes that electronic health records, which were used in 18% of the visits, did not improve routine health care. Although experts believe that electronic health records will reduce medical errors, this is the first report study on the impact of electronic records on health care quality. According to the Reuters report,

Our findings were a bit of a surprise. We did expect practices (with electronic medical records) would have better quality of care,” said Dr. Randall Stafford of Stanford University. “They really performed about the same,” he said in a telephone interview.