Remembering the Real Stakeholders: Patient Privacy Rights Comments on the Proposed CMS Regulation Pursuant to the Cures Act

Deborah C. Peele Adrian Gropper By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH C. PEEL, MD Electronic health records (EHRs) are a polarizing issue in health reform. In their current form, they are frustrating to many physicians and have failed to support cost improvements. The current round of federal intervention is proposed rulemaking pursuant to the 21st Century Cures Act calls for penalties for “information blocking” and for technology that physicians and patients could use “without special effort.” The proposed rules are over one thousand pages of technical jargon that aims to govern how one machine communicates with another when the content of the communication is personal and very valuable information about an individual. Healthcare is a challenging and unique industry when it comes to interoperability. Hospitals spend lavishly on EHRs and pursue information blocking as a means to manipulate the physicians and patients who might otherwise bypass the hospital on the way to health reform. The result is a broken market where physicians and patients directly control trillions of dollars in spending but have virtually zero market power over the technology that hospitals and payers operate as information brokers. What follows below are comments by Patient Privacy Rights on the proposed rule. The common thread of our comments is the need to treat patients and physicians, not the data brokers, as the real stakeholders. Comments to the ONC Rule ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Data Health Policy 21st Century Cures Act Adrian Gropper Deborah Peel ONC Rules Patient Privacy Rights Source Type: blogs