A complete overhaul is “the appropriate approach,” and one that doctors could support, according to a spokesman for the American Medical Association. “We are not talking about painting the walls. We are talking about stripping things down to the bare studs and coming back to this and looking at it from a fresh start.
“We have a perfect storm of opportunity here to really rethink the program,” the spokesman said. “It’s not just rethinking the program from the standpoint of burden; it’s rethinking CMS programs from the standpoint of collapsing some of the reporting into to one holistic picture where the doctor is participating with their patients in chronic care or different care teams or the patient-centered medical home.”
And fixing those regulations is going to go a long way in helping patients to actually interact with their data and to really put them in the center of their care; this is especially important since EHRs are currently built to comply with reporting requirements and not necessarily to help improve care, the AMA spokesman noted. And while current patient portal requirements promote engagement, the information is not necessarily useful for patients.
“What we see as the next step is an opportunity here to reduce some of the prescriptive nature of the regulation on the design and use of EHRs,” the spokesman said. “It is an interesting way to look at it because, while we want to encourage patients to access their complete record set, the front-to-back side of their entire medical record is not always available due to EHR design.”