VA and CMS are Leading From Behind

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD Instead of empowering patients, VA and CMS are building-in rent-seeking intermediaries like NATE and DirectTrust based on obsolete security protocols and effectively legitimizing data blocking practices. Four years ago Stage 2 was still open on the table and I wrote A Fork in the Road to Meaningful Use. It foretold pretty accurately the information blocking characterized by VP Biden recently as: “Taxpayers did not spend $30 Billion to create five data silos.” I was certainly not alone. Independent expert panels like JASON and PCAST saw it coming too. Regulatory capture might explain, but not excuse, the actions of federal regulators around Stage 2 but it does not explain why our federal health system, VA and CMS, continues to promote policies that enable information blocking today. John Halalmka’s wish list and the Massachusetts Medical Society wish list approach health IT from different perspectives but they both imply a need for a patient-centered perspective. To get there, we need to give real market power to physicians and to patients. That power depends on unmediated control over how personal health information flows away from the current institutional EHR silos. HIPAA allows unmediated patient control. The recently concluded API Task Force endorsed unmediated control. VA and CMS need to take the correct fork this time. VA and CMS, however, are announcing policies that put practice and technology innovators at a huge economic disadvantage. A...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs