Statement on the Senate HELP Committee Hearing on “Implementing the 21st Century Cures Act: Making Electronic Health Information Available to Patients and Providers”

By Blair Childs, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs, Premier

As the Committee examines the implications of the ONC and CMS proposed rules, the Premier healthcare alliance urges close attention to several areas. Overall, we believe the rules are heading in the right direction to address the healthcare system’s ongoing health information interoperability challenges. Where they fall short is in ensuring that providers have the unfettered access to their patients’ health data that they need at the point of care and within the workflow.

The ability of healthcare providers to connect to third party applications of their choosing is essential to deliver informed, high-quality, safe, coordinated and cost-effective care. For this, we need to accelerate the adoption of additional standards and implementation guides, especially ‘read-write’ capabilities that allow third party applications to send data to and receive data from EHRs.

The agencies also need to go to greater lengths to reduce provider administrative and reporting burdens and guard against unrestrained and opaque charges by EHR vendors that will inhibit access to data providers need to obtain insight into care.