MMS Requests Time to Comply with Mandate on Electronic Health Records
BOSTON — The Mass. Medical Society (MMS) testified today before the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Health Care Financing in strong support of House 1023, a bill that would provide additional time for healthcare providers to comply with the interoperable electronic health record (EHR) mandate contained in the 2012 healthcare cost-containment bill, Chapter 224.
The mandate requires providers to establish an electronic-health-record system by 2017 that is interoperable, or compatible with, other electronic-health-record systems.
MMS President Dr. Dennis Dimitri, testifying on behalf of the physicians’ organization, said that, while “electronic health records and e-prescribing can be helpful to patient care in many instances, EHRs have not been a panacea for all providers in all settings. Subspecialties such as psychiatry may prefer to avoid interoperability to protect the privacy concerns of their patients, and solo or small-group providers with limited patient panels often cannot justify the significant expense of well-functioning, interoperable EHRs.”
The society noted that true interoperability, even among facilities in the same group, remains elusive, and that the evidence is also starting to show problems related to systems plagued by technical deficiencies, interoperability issues in similar systems, and even foreign-based software providers with outages that can prevent physicians from accessing patient information for days.
“While the medical society continues to study and encourage adoption of interoperable medical records where appropriate,” Dimitri said, “legislative mandates carrying financial penalties are not the appropriate policy level to promote this practice.”
Dimitri called attention to a similar provision in Chapter 224 that resulted in the state Board of Registration in Medicine establishing regulations to ensure that all licensed physicians are proficient in using electronic health records. “We believe that this is more than sufficient pressure to encourage the use of electronic health records.”
Dimitri also noted that the 2017 mandate applies to all healthcare providers, not just physicians. “While physicians are much further along on interoperable records than many other professions, 2017 is not achievable for all of us, and much less so for other providers. This date was arbitrary and aspirational when established and needs to be recalculated to a more reasonable goal, such as 2022.”
The complete testimony may be read at www.massmed.org/testimony.