WASHINGTON -- Senior Trump administration officials announced final technology rules for electronic health care records on Monday, amid growing concerns over the coronavirus.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar made the announcement, which was originally planned for a health care conference in Florida that was canceled over coronavirus concerns. Azar was joined by White House health policy chief Joe Grogan, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma, and Donald Rucker, the government's National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
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It could take several years for consumers and patients to start seeing the practical effects from the long-awaited rules. They are intended to get at one of the major problems with electronic health records: the systems of hospitals and doctors often don't 'talk' to each other, and patients struggle to get their medical information digitally transmitted, defaulting to CDs and faxed paper records.
The federal government invested more than $30 billion a decade ago to help hospitals and doctors convert to computerized records. But it never solved the problems of getting the different medical systems to seamlessly interact, and of providing a pathway for patients to easily access their records. Two rules finalized by the Trump administration aim to finally fix that.
The regulations are highly complex, and hospitals immediately objected, saying that patient privacy would be undermined.
One rule from the Health and Human Services agency that oversees health care technology would implement congressional requirements that hospitals and other health care entities put a stop to practices that can block the digital transfer of information. Some systems don't allow screen shots or video to be shared, for example.
The health care technology office rule also tries to address access problems at the patient's level. It requires hospitals and other health care service providers to allow access to records via software used by smartphone apps, such as the ones that already handle banking and credit card transactions. Patients could simply access their records via the smartphone in their back pocket.
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A companion rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would require health plans in Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, "Obamacare" and the children's health insurance program to give patients access to their information through apps compatible with smartphones.
The centers rule will also require hospitals to electronically notify a patient's outside doctors when that patient is admitted, discharged or transferred.
The hope is that easier access and authorized sharing of individuals' health care information will help prevent medical errors, cut down on duplicative tests, and make the individual patient a smarter consumer of health care services.
But Rick Pollack, president of the American Hospital Association, said a new generation of health care apps could put the personal information of patients at risk, since the app developers would not be required to meet the same legal standards for privacy that are imposed on hospitals. "This could lead to third party apps using personal health information in ways in which patients are unaware," Pollack said in a statement.
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen also criticized the new rules, saying they fail to guarantee that sensitive information won't fall into the hands of third parties that could exploit it for profit.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it has adopted a health care privacy standard that is used in the smartphone app industry, and intends to build on it to provide consumers with a higher level of protection.
The administration's plan had been to make the announcement at a global health technology conference sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in Orlando this week. But that event was canceled over concerns about large gatherings where travelers can unwittingly spread coronavirus.
During the news conference, questions veered back to the global outbreak increasingly affecting U.S. communities.
"The notion that we can't do our day jobs and work on this very serious issue [coronavirus] is absurd," Azar said, after one reporter noted that financial markets had opened sharply lower over fears of global economic damage resulting from the outbreak.
Azar recapped administration actions to try to contain the spread of the virus in the U.S., develop tests and vaccines, work with local officials in areas that are seeing outbreaks, and care for the sick.
A Section on 03/10/2020