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Physician groups are growing increasingly frustrated with the focus on meaningful use of electronic health records at the expense of creating an interoperable health information technology infrastructure and are calling on the Department of Health & Human Services to step up on interoperability.
In an Oct. 15 letter to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, a number of groups cited the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s finding that less than 14% of physicians are able to electronically transmit health information outside of their organization because of a lack of EHR interoperability and other issues.
Courtesy HHS
Sylvia Burwell
“These barriers to data exchange proliferated as a result of a variety of factors [including] strict MU [meaningful use] requirements and deadlines that do not provide sufficient time to focus on achieving interoperability. This dynamic is also in part due to the strict EHR certification requirements that have forced all stakeholders involved to focus on meeting MU measures as opposed to developing more innovative technological solutions that will enhance patient care and safety while growing the marketplace.”
Groups signing the letter include the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Medical Association, Medical Group Management Association, National Rural Health Association and a number of health care systems.
The letter also notes that in addition to interoperability, usability remains an issue that causes disruption in provider workflow and diverts resources away from patient care, noting that “vendors are limited from addressing these concerns as they focus on meeting increasingly complex certification requirements.”
Among its recommendations, the groups asked for HHS to recognize that the vendor community needs time to develop, test, and implement updates to meet new criteria and should be afforded that time “before continuing on with subsequent stages of the MU program. Testing and achievement of specific performance benchmarks should occur before providers are held accountable for any MU requirements.”
The letter comes as an advisory committee to the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) is making a same-day recommendation that it delays or staggers meaningful use stage 3 to shift focus on achieving meaningful interoperability and addressing other infrastructure issues.
In its October 2014 report to Congress, the ONC acknowledged issues related to interoperability and other issues that are presenting a barrier for health IT to achieve potential.
“Despite progress in establishing standards and services to support health information exchange and interoperability, practice patterns have not changed to the point that health care providers share patient health information electronically across organizational, vendor, and geographic boundaries,” the report states. “Patient electronic health information needs to be available for appropriate use in solving major challenges, such as providing more effective care and informing and accelerating scientific research.”
To that end, ONC released during an Oct. 15 advisory committee meeting some top-level aspects of its 10-year framework on how it will improve interoperability, which is scheduled to be formalized in March 2015.
According to draft materials, the roadmap calls for health care providers to be able to send, receive, find, and use a basic set of essential health information. By 2020, more granular information should be accessible across systems, which would lead to improved quality and reduced costs. By 2024, the interoperability vision, with systems communicating in full, will lead to a learning health system and facilitate ubiquitous precision medicine.
Separately, AMA in an Oct. 14 letter to CMS and ONC criticized the meaningful use program and offered a series of recommendations to fix it before movement to stage 3 of the program. The group wants to see more flexibility in requirements physicians need to meet requirements, expanding hardship exemptions for all stages, improving quality reporting, and addressing physician EHR usability challenges.
“Many of the MU requirements were designed to increase patient choice and quality of care,” the AMA writes. “Unfortunately, many of these requirements, especially those in the latter phases of the MU program, are having the opposite effect. Oftentimes the requirements decrease the efficiency of patient visits.”
AMA also called on CMS and ONC to “study the total cost of compliance with MU to understand the impact this program is having on practice.”