The need for customized electronic health records software may be pricing out some hospitals, according to a collaborative study done by a Harvard Medical School doctor and an MIT Sloan School of Management professor.

The study, which will be published in the journal Management Science, found that because privacy laws differ across states, EHR software often has to be customized to account for these differences. This is a potential barrier for many hospitals, because customization costs money.

States that had unique health privacy laws in place experienced a 20 to 30 percent reduction in EHR adoption rates, Catherine Tucker, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor and the study's coauthor said.

"What we found is that when we were talking to hospitals, a lot of the costs came because these state laws are very different and so it meant that a vendor couldn't sell a standardized solution," she told The Boston Globe. "Any time you mention customization and software, it gets costly."

However, there is one potential way to hold costs down for hospitals that can't afford commercial solutions: Using open-source software.

For instance, the EHR package built by the Veteran's Administration using taxpayer dollars is free and open source, although hospitals will need to spend money and time to customize it to fit their needs.

In addition, West Virginia senator John J. Rockefeller last month introduced Senate Bill 90, the Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009, which would help promote open source EHR and offer grants to hospitals willing to implement it.

Medsphere, a company that has helped commercialized VistA, sells its EHR software "for comparative pennies on the dollar," CNET reported. Proprietary systems comparable to what Medsphere offers typically run between $10 and $20 million dollars.