Senate Committee Looking To Address EHR Issues
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
The Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) Committee is taking on EHR (electronic health records) issues identified through six hearings it conducted this year, the last of which was completed in early October, according to the NationalJournal. The hearing revealed issues around information exchange between vendors, information blocking, and patients not having easy access to their health data.
Chairman Lamar Alexander (R) and top Democrat Patty Murray announced the workgroups in late April. The groups held discussions with providers, IT developers, and other IT experts to better understand what’s happening in the world of EHRs.
The hearings have been completed and currently the working groups are prioritizing items that will be including in the bill. The committee has outlined seven “areas of agreement for legislation to actually achieve interoperability.”
- Decreasing unnecessary physician documentation
- Granting patients easy access to their records
- Improving entire-team access to EHRs
- Stopping information blocking
- Improving standards
- Improving security and privacy around records
- Validating certifications of records systems
According to Lamar, “We’ve really become very interested in electronic healthcare records, which are essential to precision medicine, which is the president’s proposal, and to the shared goal of Congress and the president to change the way we pay doctors from fee-for-service to the quality of the service they deliver … And in both cases, having good, functioning, electronic health care records helps the doctor do a better job of serving patients. And that program got off track.”
Murray has goals beyond that. She also plans on tackling initiatives around developing robust security, facilitating providers shopping and comparing EHR systems, and helping patients access their health data.
A bipartisan bill introduced by HELP Committee members Bill Cassidy and Sheldon Whitehouse early in October aims to address some of those issues.
Alexander has also criticized the speed with which Meaningful Use Stage 3 has been rolled out on the grounds that it diverts “resources and attention from other efforts to enable interoperability.”
Going Deeper
To read more on the recent legislative history around EHR deployment and interoperability, please read the following articles:
Senate Hearing On EHRs And ICD-10 Reveals Skepticism
Senate Hearing Holds Both Solutions Providers And Healthcare Responsible For Information Blocking