The Department of Health and Human Services’ interoperability and information blocking rules have finally begun the implementation phase, as the first major compliance milestones went into effect earlier this week. While healthcare providers and IT vendors have had time to prepare, there’s still a concern of how everyone will be able to maintain compliance according to industry executives such as the lead regulatory strategist at Cerner.
While the concept of not being able to interfere with access to electronic health data seems like a simple one, it’s the scope of what information is covered that may be overwhelming. At Cerner, they’re trying to catalog all the different places they receive requests for information from and how they respond to these requests so they have a full library and set of operations behind potential places for a violation.
Organizations like the Texas Medical Association are hoping to start collecting the confusing scenarios that practitioners may run into, such as when a request for information regarding shared patients can’t be completed due to a technology incompatibility. It’s pretty much in the nature of health information management that there will be many more scenarios like this, and they’ll have more complexity and nuance as well.
It seems there will be some time to work out these kinks though, as even though the new regulation is taking effect, the penalties that can be imposed from it haven’t been finalized. Under what’s been proposed though, healthcare providers are likely to avoid direct monetary fines and instead be subject to disincentives that could affect government reimbursement.
It's a good thing that this milestone doesn’t mean that fines are following immediately behind. A study reported on by Health Imaging found that a majority of healthcare organizations aren’t prepared for the interoperability and info blocking rules that just went into effect. It seems the biggest problem is once again around specifics.
Healthcare providers often wait a certain amount of time before releasing information to patients to properly coordinate care and discuss findings, but it’s not clear whether or not this violates the new info blocking rules.
Overall, what’s clear is that there’s going to be an adjustment period to these rules as specific scenarios play out and are judged. It seems that the government expects this and is leaving some breathing room before enforcement actions ramp up.
At Extract we know that data sharing can be difficult simply because of the amount of paper that’s still involved in the healthcare process. This paper is generated internally but also comes from places like outside labs where providers don’t really have control over it. That’s why we offer a software that takes that paper (or image file) and automatically puts the discrete data you need in the EMR or other downstream system.
If you’d like to learn more about how we do this, please reach out.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.