EHR Vendor Holding Patient Data "Hostage"
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
A dispute between an electronic health records (EHR) solutions provider and a small rural healthcare provider in Maine has resulted in patient data being held “hostage,” according to The Boston Globe.
CompuGroup, a German company whose U.S. headquarters are based in Boston, has decided to block access to the medical histories on 4,000 patients in response to a billing dispute — a practice that isn’t common in the industry. Clinicians have lost access to view diabetes records, blood pressure logs, medication histories, allergy reports, lab results, and more. The company’s decision poses a potential threat to patient safety.
The company has drawn an analogy between its decision to block access to patient records and a utility company cutting off access to a customer who hasn’t paid their bills.
The dispute originated with a rate increase. Originally, maintenance fees on the contract were $300 a month. After CompuGroup purchased HealthPort’s EHR business (18 months later), they raised the fees to $2000 monthly.
The Billing Dispute
Full Circle Health Care has accumulated $20,000 in overdue bills, and admits that they haven’t paid for about ten months. Victoria Glover, a physician assistant and owner of Full Circle, says that they stopped paying the bills after months of disagreement over the provider being overcharged, surprise maintenance fees, and being billed for hardware she says was never delivered. According to Glover, CompuGroup refused to acknowledge or rectify any of these issues.
The Reaction
Full Circle has since switched to another EHR vendor, but still does not have access to the older records — records that still impact treatment decisions. The records reside on an old server in a closet in Glover’s office.
Broader Impact
According to The Globe, the fight between the small practice and multinational corporation may have broader implications. Among the flood of providers who rushed to take advantage of federal subsidies in 2009, few took the time to figure out what would happen if a system stopped working correctly, if a solutions provider (or a healthcare provider) went out of business or had financial troubles, or if the two parties simply couldn’t come to an agreement over a dispute.
While the situation in Maine represents a worst-case scenario, other healthcare providers understand that they could face similar situations if a disagreement arose between them and their IT solutions providers.
Similar cases have happened before. A lawsuit in Wisconsin in 2013 between Milwaukee Health Services and an Atlanta-based solutions provider ended when a judge said the healthcare practice could solve the matter by simply paying their bill.