Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

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 U.S. 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.