Information Blocking–The AHA Comments & PPR Responds

By ADRIAN GROPPER

The focus on the CMS rules on information blocking continues on THCB. We’ve heard from Adrian Gropper & Deborah Peel at Patients Privacy Rights, and from e-Patient Dave at SPM and Michael Millenson. Now Adrian Gropper summarizes — and in an linked article –notates on the American Hospital Association’s somewhat opposite perspective–Matthew Holt

It’s “all hands on deck” for hospitals as CMS ponders the definition and remedies for 21st Century Cures Act information blocking.

This annotated excerpt from the recent public comments on CMS–1694–P, Medicare Program; Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems…  analyzes the hospital strategy and exposes a campaign of FUD to derail HHS efforts toward a more patient-centered health records infrastructure.

Simply put, patient-directed health records sharing threatens the strategic manipulation of interoperability. When records are shared without patient consent under the HIPAA Treatment, Payment and Operations the hospital has almost total control.Patient and physician advocates like Patient Privacy Rights propose a patient-directed approach to national-scale health records sharing as a safe harbor for hospitals at risk of “information blocking”.  The consented approach, analogous to how our money is moved, avoids many privacy problems, does not require patient-matching, and avoids the hereto insurmountable problem of trust across the very diverse participants that make up a patient’s real-world care team.

The HITECH strategy of the previous Administration was markedly hospital-centered and has resulted in rising costs due to provider consolidation, a stunning lack of innovation in either technology or medical practice, and “burnout” on the part of disempowered physicians.

The bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act offers the current Administration the opportunity to change strategy in favor of a patient and physician-centered health IT architecture that regulates the interface (the Open API) rather than the software (the EHR). Needless to say, the hospitals would rather double-down on the current policies and continue to slow-walk any changes that might lead to practice innovation.

The linked document debates;

• Conditions of Participation in Medicare as a payment-based stick instead of the hospital-centered carrots of the previous strategy;

• The implementation of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) to fulfill 21st Century Cures mandates;

• The definition of Information Blocking and the potential for a safe harbor when hospitals enable opt-in patient-directed sharing “without special effort”;

• Avoiding a compromise between security and interoperability by implementing the recommendations of the API Task Force;

• Using the new Medicare Blue Button 2.0 as a model for how institutions can share patient-level data cost-effectively, with each other;

The American Hospital Association has done all of us a great service by summarizing the laws and clearly arguing their position in a relatively succinct and readable manner. By using the comment format in a public Google document, PPR is keeping the structure of the AHA argument and offering an alternative recommendation, concisely.

ONC is hosting the 2nd Interoperability Forum on August 6th- 8th, 2018 (accessible online) and CMS is taking yet another round of public comment on some of this through September 10. Let us continue this exploration through your comments right here in THCB.

Adrian Gropper MD is CTO of Patient Privacy Rights

from THCB https://ift.tt/2NtxlR9