The electronic medical record (EMR) implementation incentives offered through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are equally available to hundreds of specialists and subspecialists. Unfortunately, availability does not guarantee ease of access. Dr. John Halamka, a staunch advocate for meaningful use and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO, admits that meaningful use compliance is harder for specialists. He likened the compliance obstacles to a square peg/round hole conundrum in his 2010 presentations, before stage 1 was finalized.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) drafted a new proposed rule that would make lab reports more accessible, particularly to patients. According to an article in Modern Healthcare, the proposed rule notes that some states do not allow patients direct access to lab test results. Currently, the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA) only allows three categories of individuals to receive lab test results: the “authorized person,” the person who will use the results in the treatment context, and the referring lab. The 45-page proposed rule would change this stipulation, so patients in the affected states wouldn’t have to wait for the results to be reported by their ordering physician.
A researcher with Identity Finder recently discovered that nearly 300,000 Californians’ medical records were openly accessible on the Internet for an undisclosed amount of time. The researcher, Aaron Titus, said the data was “available to anyone in the world with half a brain and access to Google.” The fiasco could have been easily prevented by requiring a password to access the data and instructing search engines not to index the pages.
According to many health IT experts, the electronic medical record (EMR) vendor Epic "holds in its hands the future of health information technology policy,” according to a recent Modern Healthcare article. While Epic does have a significant chunk of the EMR market for hospitals, there are others who have share a significant voice in the EMR world.