Following up on Tuesday’s hearing held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee (HELP), the leaders at the Charlotte-based Premier Inc. have released a statement regarding the proposed interoperability rules called for by the 21st Century Cures Act, and expressing optimism that the proposed rules “will help foster increased access to data for both providers and patients and ongoing innovation and competition in the health IT marketplace.”
As Healthcare Innovation Managing Editor Rajiv Leventhal reported on March 26, “During a Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee (HELP) committee hearing on March 26, members of Congress and health IT stakeholders discoursed on patient privacy and data access, in the context of two recently proposed rules the government released on interoperability.” The hearing, he noted, was led by Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R.-Tenn.), under the title, “Implementing the 21st Century Cures Act: Making Electronic Health Information Available to Patients and Providers.” And it featured witness testimony from multiple industry stakeholders, including: Ben Moscovitch, project director health information technology, The Pew Charitable Trusts; Lucia Savage, chief privacy and regulatory officer, Omada Health, Inc.; Mary Grealy, president, Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC); and Christopher Rehm, M.D., chief medical informatics officer (CMIO), LifePoint Health.
During the meeting Tuesday, Chairman Alexander stated that two new proposed regulations dropped last month—one from CMS (the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) and one from ONC (the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT)—related to interoperability and patient access “should give more than 125 million patients easier access to their own records in an electronic format, according to HHS [the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services].” He added, “This will be a huge relief to any of us who have spent hours tracking down paper copies of our records and carting them back and forth to different doctors’ offices. The rules will reduce administrative burden on doctors so they can spend more time with patients.”
In response to the committee hearing, Premier’s statement, published in a press release, said, “Premier submitted a statement for the record for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on ‘Implementing the 21st Century Cures Act: Making Electronic Health Information Available to Patients and Providers.’ Premier is optimistic that the proposed interoperability rules called for by the 21st Century Cures Act will help foster increased access to data for both providers and patients and ongoing innovation and competition in the health IT marketplace. We are also carefully evaluating several aspects of the proposed rules for potential unintended consequences and proposals that could be strengthened to help achieve nationwide interoperability.”
“Premier Inc.,” the organization states, referencing itself, “is a leading healthcare improvement company, uniting an alliance of more than 4,000 U.S. hospitals and health systems and approximately 165,000 other providers and organizations to transform healthcare.”
