Data blocking
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A Chat with CommonWell’s Executive Director: Interoperability’s Next Steps, Data Blocking, and Epic
It’s been a little over three years since the CommonWell Health Alliance, an industry trade group made up of many of the largest electronic health record (EHR) systems vendors and other health IT companies, formed at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference with the goal to greatly enhance health data exchange. And, it’s been a little over a year since the Alliance tapped Jitin Asnaani as its founding executive director...
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Can SMART on FHIR Solve mHealth’s Medication Management Challenges?
An agreement to promote interoperability between three of the largest and most competitive EHR platforms has set the stage for a breakthrough in mHealth medication management. Using the SMART on FHIR app platform, providers will be able to access a patient’s entire medication history no matter where that data is stored. While this opens the door to better care management and coordination, it also gives patients the mHealth tools to manage their own care and collaborate with their doctors...
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CMS Inclusion of API’s for Stage 3 Meaningful Use Rule is the Right Decision
One of these rules, the decoupling of EHR certification and meaningful use brings some hope to those looking to build upon established EHRs and other health databases. Prior to this, there has been a very tightly held belief that EHR systems would contain the answers needed to fulfill all governmental regulations, something that has not been shown to be the case. EHR’s are becoming very important tools for healthcare delivery, yet their regimented, and for the most part proprietary data storage models, do not allow for easy customization to meet the needs of our patients and the various healthcare professionals dependent upon them for day-to-day management of patients.
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EHR Use Hindered by Revenue Loss, Lack of Interoperability
EHR use has been on the rise since the 2009 passing of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provided financial incentives for EHR implementation. However, do the gains of EHR adoption outweigh the substantial costs? A recent study written by Tara O’Neill of the American Action Forum takes a look at these questions and states that although there are considerable benefits to EHR adoption, these come with costs that can only be resolved with changes in healthcare policy...
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EHRs, IoT, Revenue Cycle Bring Opportunities for Healthcare APIs
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are quickly becoming a critical tool for healthcare organizations looking to build interoperable connections, and it is likely that this new standard for health data exchange will keep growing in importance during the next few years. A new report from Market Research Engine (MRE) predicts healthy growth for the nascent healthcare API ecosystem, forecasting a 4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that will produce a $234 million market by 2024....
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HELP Committee Passes Patient Centered Care EHR Bill
The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee legislation on improved EHR use has passed, according to a public statement from the committee. The bill’s passage was unanimous. Earlier this year, the HELP Committee drafted legislation to improve EHR use. This legislation centered primarily on improving physician EHR use, decreasing data blocking, and making health IT patient-centered...
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HHS CTO Susannah Fox on Health Datapalooza
Every spring, our team in the HHS IDEA Lab gears up for our biggest event of the year: the Health Datapalooza. It’s an annual celebration of the power of data that was started by my predecessor, Todd Park, in 2010. This year, we were honored to hear from an extraordinary lineup of leaders from private industry, academia and the federal government, including Vice President Biden. I thought I’d share excerpts from three of my colleagues’ speeches, to give people a sense of the scope and depth of the discussions.
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HIMSS18: Seema Verma - Making the patient the center of our health care system
I’ve always been struck by how seldom the patient is mentioned in discussions around value-based care. Let me be clear, we will not achieve value-based care until we put the patient at the center of our healthcare system. Until patients can make their own decisions based on quality and value health care costs will continue to grow at an unsustainable rate. This administration is dedicated to putting patients first, to be empowered consumers of health care that have the information they need to be engaged and active decision-makers in their care. Through this empowerment, there will be a competitive advantage for providers that deliver coordinated, quality care, at the best value, to attract patients who are shopping for value.
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Is Cloud Faxing the Solution to the Health IT Usability and Interoperability Crisis?
The Healthcare industry is in profound crisis as the HITECH Act of 2009 led medical facilities across the United States to spend in excess of $3 trillion on the purchase and implementation of expensive electronic health records (EHRs) under the Meaningful Use program. Yet, the most fundamental goals of electronic records Nirvana that were promised have not been achieved. For multiple reasons, EHRs have turned out to lack usability and be non-interoperable. In fact, most monopoly EHR vendors are engaged in what is commonly called “data blocking.” In most cases physicians are unable to obtain medical records for the patients they are seeing and patients have a hard time getting a hold of their own medical records. That means that the medical records are not available at the most important moment, the caregiver/patient encounter, and are not available to the patients themselves and their family members.
- The Future Is Open
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Is EHR data blocking really as bad as ONC claims?
Consensus that EHR vendors and profit-hungry hospitals are intentionally making it hard for patients and others to access date is based on evidence – much of it put forth by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT – that is largely anecdotal. Center for Medical Interoperability vice president Kerry McDermott says data blocking is a systemic issue because information sharing is a new practice in healthcare...
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Is The 1.5+ Trillion Dollar HITECH Act a Failure?
Hopefully, the public statements made by President Obama and Vice President Biden will lead to a public debate over the monumental problems that the HITECH Act and proprietary EHR vendors have caused the American people. While the press continues to report the figure of $35 billion as the cost of implementing EHRs, that figure does not tell the entire story. Perhaps the next step is to provide accountability and transparency. That would start with firm numbers regarding the real costs of EHR implementations forced on an unprepared healthcare system by the HITECH Act.
- The Future Is Open
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Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?
Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.
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Obama and Biden Blast EHR Vendors for Data Blocking
As they are winding their terms in office, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden dropped a stink bomb on the health IT industry. Speaking at different events on Friday, January 9th, the President and Vice President both criticized proprietary electronic health record (EHR) vendors as the primary obstacle to the success of their administration’s health care strategy. This is the highest level acknowledgment so far of the serious impact that “lock-in” EHR software vendors are having on America’s medical infrastructure and the ability of physicians to provide medical care.
ONC fail: EHR 'data blocking' still rampant
Manuel Prado, president of Viva Transcription, Santa Cruz, Calif., publicly complained two years ago about the high interface fees – up to $10,000 – that electronic health record vendors charged for each hospital or physician practice they connect to his transcription service. “That's data blocking,” he charged. “If taxpayers are contributing $44,000 or $63,000 (in federal Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments) for each EHR, it's not too much to ask” that they make interconnect charges free.
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ONC Playbook Breaks Down Health IT, EHR Tasks and Buzzwords
The healthcare industry seems to be largely driven by buzzwords: quick and snappy phrases that reduce complex, difficult, expensive and often confusing initiatives into keywords that may not mean much to the uninitiated. From big data and population health management to electronic health records and value-based care, these short and sweet terms have come to define the new direction of one of the nation’s largest sectors...
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