Last week, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a final rule imposing financial sanctions by its Office for Civil Rights on service providers found to be blocking information, the reaction from industry groups was swift and largely disapproving.
The purpose of such penalties, which can be significant for non-compliant health systems, is clearly to deter organizations from engaging in information blocking activities.
But hospitals and physician groups — echoing what they said about the proposed regulations drafted last fall — are complaining that the curbs outlined in the June 24 final rule are “overreaching” and could be counterproductive to the larger goal of value-based care.
As finalized, the new rules are “unnecessarily punitive, financially damaging to practices and negatively impacting Medicare patients,” the Medical Group Management Association said last week. For its part, the American Hospital Association said it is “deeply concerned that the blocking structure retained in the final rule is excessive, confusing, and unbalanced.”
But others in the health care industry — admittedly not the providers bound by these rules — are taking a more optimistic view of what blocking enforcement could do for patients. Healthcare IT News received some feedback on the final rule from executives at several tech companies whose tools are already operating in healthcare settings. Here’s what they had to say.
‘Basic Mission’
“I admire ONC and CMS for enacting the 21st Century Cures Act,” said Dr. Jay Anders, chief medical officer at analytics company Medicomp Systems. “The stiff penalties they now impose serve as a strong incentive to comply. It is important to remember that patients suffer when their medical records are not available when they need them. If we are to bend the cost curve in U.S. health care, complete medical records must be available for every patient. A lack of shared patient information is not only costly, it is potentially deadly.”
Another health director agreed that the severity of penalties was essential to help prevent the serious harms of information suppression.
“ONC has drawn a deep, hard line that poses enormous economic and reputational risks, with fines of up to $1 million, and so far, at least, shows that nearly all of the 1,000 complaints reported to date meet the Office of Inspector General’s investigative criteria,” said Colin Banas, Ph.D., chief marketing officer at DrFirst, which develops patient-focused medication management tools. “This heralds a painful reckoning ahead for any healthcare professional who impedes patient access and progress at this stage of evolving interoperability.”
“Data is the most important component of our ability to transform healthcare as a nation,” added Greg Miller, vice president of business development at Carta Healthcare, whose products focus on clinical data abstraction. “Access to and dissemination of quality data is essential to improving patient outcomes. Limiting data access and interoperability will harm the quality of patient care, increase costs, and significantly reduce customer (patient) satisfaction.”
For her part, Sandra Johnson, senior vice president of customer service at EHR developer CliniComp, said she hopes the final rule will pave the way for more freely flowing data that can be aggregated and accessed for better patient care.
“What is needed to handle all the data coming in is technology designed to seamlessly integrate and present data from different sources, ensuring a comprehensive view of a patient’s health,” she said. “By facilitating unrestricted access to electronic health information, we can promote coordinated and efficient care across the entire health care system.”
Kim Perry, chief growth officer at emtelligent, which develops natural language processing technology for a variety of clinical use cases, adds that trusted information is critical to care coordination and, in fact, aligns with “the fundamental mission of doing what is right for patients and the healthcare community; it also helps unlock the full value of the electronic health record (EHR) for care providers, patients, and the entire population.”
Meanwhile, Zack Tisch, senior vice president of health care services at Pivot Point Consulting, said it’s time for HHS to hold providers accountable for their data-sharing practices.
“After years of encouraging EHR platforms, application vendors, and health information networks to ‘eat carrots’ in the name of better, more coordinated care, the Department of Health and Human Services is now implementing a long-overdue enforcement mechanism – significant financial penalties related to the Medicare Reimbursement Program, MIPS, and Medicare Shared Savings Program for non-participating organizations,” Tisch said.
“While these standards and expectations have been established for years, we can still see challenges in adoption as health systems of all shapes and sizes struggle to find the money, resources, and time to implement the many IT requirements currently on their roadmap, which often include: interoperability, cloud migration, near/offshore migration, AI/automation-based workflow optimization, self-service analytics, digital transformation, etc.
“By tightening controls on data blocking and providing full transparency,” he added, “we hope to advance the overarching goals of the 21st Century Cures Act — fostering a healthcare ecosystem where data flows freely and securely to support innovation and patient-centered care.”
Mike Miliard is executive editor of Healthcare IT News
Email the author: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS.
