Health Information Compliance Alert

Plus: CMS updates with another podcast.

Industry insiders believe the proposed interoperability rule’s quicker-than-usual required timeline for implementation will likely sink its success.

In an open letter to Donald Rucker, MD, the national coordinator at the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the HIMSS Electronic Health Records Association (EHRA) argues that there’s not enough ramp-up time to adequately address all the changes that the proposed rule demands.

Reminder: The ONC proposed rule, published in the Federal Register on March 4, aims to update EHR-vendor requirements, pediatric health IT, application programming interface (API) fee regulations, certification mandates, national interoperability standards, and rules to prohibit information blocking.

“Developing and implementing software takes time, from the time EHR developers spend in designing workflows, writing code, and performing extensive testing, to the time spent by healthcare organizations installing, customizing, and educating their users on the new workflows and expectations,” insists the EHRA. The group also maintains that while some of the proposals — offering ePrescribing as an example — might be possible within the time constraints, the majority will be impossible to achieve successfully so quickly.

The association’s letter advises the ONC to include more stakeholder input and move slowly to avoid barriers to improving on the promises of interoperability outlined in the 21st Century Cures Act.

Read the EHRA’s letter for more details and explanations on the organization’s reasoning at www.ehra.org/sites/ehra.org/files/EHR Association Response to ONC Proposed Rule on Interoperability Information Blocking and Certification Program.pdf.

In other news...

If you need help understanding the plethora of payment models that have dropped over the last two months, you’re in luck. A new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) podcast offers insight.

On May 30, CMS uploaded another offering to its “CMS Beyond the Policy” podcast. This one focuses on the CMS Innovation Center and how it “acts as a developer and testing ground for innovative payment and service delivery models to improve quality of care for Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP beneficiaries, and to save taxpayer money,” the podcast summary explains.

Listen to the “CMS Innovation Center: Where We are, How Models are Developed and the Next Steps in Value” podcast at www.cms.gov/podcast/cms-innovation-center-where-we-are-how-models-are-developed-and-next-steps-value.