The study (), conducted by researchers at MIT and the University of Virginia, said adoption of EMR is often slowest in states with strong medical privacy protections.

On average, up to 30% fewer hospitals adopted EMR in states where they were forced to operate under strong privacy laws compared to hospitals in states with less stringent privacy requirements. That's because privacy protections often made it harder and more expensive for hospitals to exchange and transfer patient information, thereby reducing the value proposition of an EMR system, the study found.

"Despite EMR's effectiveness at and improving baseline indicators of patient health, hospitals are deterred from adopting it by strong healthcare privacy laws," the study claimed.

The results of the research, which looked at EMR adoption in 19 states over a 10-year period, was originally presented at a Federal Trade Commission workshop in April 2008. It was publicly released only this week following its acceptance in the journal Management Science, an MIT spokesman said.

The research suggests that there's a tradeoff between achieving fast adoption of EMR and strong health-care privacy, said Catherine Tucker, an assistant professor of marketing at MIT's Sloan School of Management and one of the report's authors. In general, while medical privacy is a good thing, it doesn't always allow for quick adoption of EMR systems, Tucker said.