AHA: Make EHR safe harbor provision permanent
While the American Hospital Association (AHA) expressed support for the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General’s (OIG’s) proposed three-year extension for regulatory protections allowing hospitals to donate health IT to eligible physicians, it asked the OIG to take it a step further and make such protections permanent.
Protections established under the federal anti-kickback law “will continue for the foreseeable future to be of critical importance to the nation’s efforts to adopt and expand operation of a robust national health IT infrastructure,” AHA Executive Vice President Richard Pollack wrote in May 13 comments on the proposed rule.
The letter went on to list real-life beneficiaries of the EHR safe harbor provision, including a Midwest rural hospital that links community providers with health IT and a west coast health system with 100 locations across three states relying on the protections to ensure connectivity. “These are only a few examples of how important the protections continue to be for hospitals to extend support properly to physicians who otherwise have constrained financial and technical resources that might limit their opportunity to use EHRs and share information across settings to improve patient care,” according to the letter.
Pollack also called for clarification of a “confusing” statement in the proposed rule’s preamble, which states that whether services enabling the interoperable exchange of EHR data fall within the scope of the safe harbor provision depend on the exact donated items or services. Pollack requested elaboration on covered technology or removal of that statement.
In other comments in the letter, AHA supported the OIG’s decision to remove a requirement that donated technology incorporate an e-prescribing ability. Also, Pollack wrote that AHA does not feel a final rule should add new conditions preventing eligible donors from “locking-in” to the donor’s exclusive benefit patient data and referrals from recipients of the donation.
“The rule already includes sufficient and effective safeguards to prevent such arrangements,” Pollack wrote, adding later, “the agency would be better served by strengthening efforts to identify and specifically target for enforcement actual individual abusive arrangements.”
A copy of the full letter is here.