GAO: Develop, prioritize actions to advance HIE
Insufficient standards, varying privacy rules, concerns about how privacy difficulties in matching patients to their records and costs all are challenges facing providers and stakeholders regarding health information exchange (HIE), according to a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
GAO interviewed stakeholders in Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota and North Carolina who identified those main challenges.
The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) developed and issued guidelines for advancing HIE last summer but the GAO report finds that the guidelines fail to specify "principles intended to guide future actions to address the key challenges that providers and stakeholders have identified."
The report also finds that a lack of coordinated care and regulatory standards "can lead to inappropriate or duplicative tests and procedures that increase healthcare spending" anywhere from $148 billion to $226 billion annually.
The GAO recommends that CMS and ONC develop and prioritize specific actions for HHS to take to advance HIE and develop milestones with timeframes for the actions to "better gauge progress toward advancing exchange." The three agencies agreed with the recommendations when commenting on the draft version of the report.Read the entire report.
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.