Patients Believe In Easy, Free Healthcare Interoperability According To Surveys
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
As the benefits of interoperability are becoming clearer, questions around costs and fees of reaching those benefits are being raised.
Recent surveys by ORC International and PriceWaterhouseCoopers address this and other issues around the interoperability question.
Patient Opinion
According to ORC International, almost 75 percent of American adults consider it very important that their most important health information be shared easily between hospitals, physicians, and other providers. Additionally, 87 percent of respondents were strongly against fees being charged to patients or even providers to transfer information.
These opinions come just as it’s been revealed via Politico that doctors are forced to pay anywhere between $5,000 and $50,000 to create the connections that allow them to send information to HIEs, governments and government entities, and blood and pathology labs. In some cases, additional fees are even charged when a doctor sends or receives data.
These feelings aren’t all based on hypothetical situations, either. The survey also revealed that almost 20 percent of Americans felt that either they or a family member had had their medical care negatively impacted because of issues sharing health records between providers. Even in the face of those numbers, 60 percent of providers claim they experience delays in accessing current patient data according to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey. They also cited that those issues are a major barrier to using healthcare information effectively.
Daniel Z. Sands, M.D. M.P.H., and co-founder and co-chair of the Society of Participatory Medicine weighs in: “What this survey points out is that when critical health information can't be shared across medical practices and hospitals, patients are put at risk ...We have the technology. What we need is for healthcare providers and systems developers to put patient interests ahead of business needs. None of them would exist were it not for the patients.”
The Reality Of Fees
These numbers put vendors in the spotlight for the rates they charge their clients for the services that help them achieve interoperability. According to Health IT Analytics, Epic Systems recently revealed that it charges providers $2.35 per patient annually to exchange health information.
Charging for infrastructure set up is a practice that generally goes unquestioned. Charging fees for data access though, has left many questioning developers on their practices, especially when done so on a per-patient or per-transaction basis.
Providers haven’t had much choice in the area, with most being at the mercy of developers who know their customers don’t have many options.
Justin Lanning, SVP and managing director of analytics at Xerox Healthcare Provider Services spoke to EHR Intelligence about the conflict, “Sometimes hospitals have to pay thousands of dollars for data sharing capabilities to be turned on or supported ... I do feel we need to shift, at this point, from thinking vendors’ growth will come from charging and often over-charging for many different areas of system functionality and integration that should simply be a part of these expensive systems.” He continues, “Some vendors feel that by making it harder to integrate with other vendors, health systems will choose to spend their money on all of the other little things they need to with the same vendor. But health systems are beginning to demand the integration for the flexibility they desire, and we must respond as a market.”