HIT Amendments Expected in Senate Economic Stimulus Bill
View the February 20, 2009 UPDATE to this post here.
UPDATE – See the February 9, 2009 UPDATE to this post here.
As the Senate works on its version of the Economic Stimulus Bill, CongressDaily is reporting the following amendments to the House version of the bill.
Reduce HIT Spending – So far, a reduction of the amount of HIT spending and incentives has not been attacked in the Senate. Good news for those of us who work within and touch HIT.
Health Care Disparities – In an effort to eliminate healthcare disparites, this amendment would require that electronic health records collect information on race, ethnicity and gender.
Health Privacy Violations – Changes would allow state attorneys general to file class-action lawsuits against violators of federal health privacy laws, and prohibit states from hiring outside lawyers on a contingency basis to ensure that damages collected are returned to taxpayers.
Data Breach Notification – Changes are aimed at closing loopholes that would in many cases prevent consumers from knowing if their medical information has been improperly accessed.
Quality Initiatives – An amendment that would exempt quality initiatives, such as disease management and care coordination efforts, from a provision that requires the HHS secretary to issue new health care operations rules.
So, thus far, all good news in terms of maintaining substantial funding for HIT. This happens to be the objective that I care about most right now–a good chunk of HIT spending that is cemented into the final bill. We can worry about the peskier of details later, in my opinion.
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Tags: Economic Stimulus Bill, Economic Stimulus HIT, EHR, Emr, HIT, HIT Incentives, HIT Spending, Medicare HIT Incentives, Reduce HIT Spending, Senate Amendments, Senate Version Of Bill
IT vendors may want to look at one specific requirement of the stimulus package privacy provisions and think about the impact it will have on the IT industry. Section 4405(c) of the House bill and 13405(c) of the Senate bill eliminates the “treatment, payment, and health care operations” exemption from the requirements for providing an accounting of disclosures by a covered entity to a patient if the covered entity uses an electronic health record (EHR). In addition, HR1 reduces the chronological scope of the accounting from 6 to 3 years (a big step in the right direction).
Do EHR products today have the capacity to generate and store for 3 years the following information on every disclosure made by a physician or hospital? the date of the disclosure; the name of the person who received the PHI and the address, if known; a brief description of what PHI was disclosed; a brief statement of the purpose of the disclosure.
Can EHRs actually capture the distinctions between a disclosure of PHI from a hospital to a health plan, for example, for treatment purposes as opposed to quality assurance purposes (health care operations)? Is it realistic for a physician or hospital to store the requisite data on every patient for 3 years? These are questions that covered entity providers are currently wrestling with, because few to no IT EHR products have such capabilities.