A Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing focused on health information blocking included testimony from Allscripts, the American College of Cardiology and more. 

“Many electronic health record vendors provide the functionality needed by the healthcare community, but also require the purchase of the specific company’s health IT products to make the elements of the EHRs fully interoperable,” said American College of Cardiology Informatics and Health Information Technology Task Force member Michael J. Mirro, MD.

“In emergency situations, the rapid, secure exchange of health information is critical. We must work toward rewarding interoperability and discouraging information blocking.”

David Kibbe, president and CEO of DirectTrust, said information blocking has impacted some providers who want to use Direct. “Interoperable health information exchange has made great progress in the past two years,” he said, but added that he thinks “the responsibility for assuring secure interoperable exchange resides primarily with the healthcare provider organizations, not the EHR vendors and not the government. However, there is a role for government to encourage and incentivize collaborative and interoperable health information exchange.

“Information blocking is a persistent and real problem” although progress is being made. “At its root the causes of information blocking are not technological or due to a lack of standards for interoperability or EHR capabilities for interoperable exchange. As noted in the ONC Report to Congress on Information Blocking of April 2015, ‘While some types of information blocking may implicate these technical standards and capabilities, most allegations of information blocking involve business practices and other conduct that interferes with the exchange of electronic health information despite the availability of standards and certified health IT capabilities that enable this information to be shared.’”

Paul M. Black, MBA, president, CEO and director of EHR vendor Allscripts, noted the investment made in the advancement of health IT toward the goal of better healthcare. “Robust, open information exchange across a multitude of vendor platforms and care settings is critical to ensuring that we meet that goal for America’s patients. An increased level of transparency and cooperation is needed to meet this challenge--health information technology developers, caregivers, employers, payers, pharmaceutical companies, health systems and the government must all work harder together to solve this problem. Tomorrow’s healthcare networks won’t be built by one company alone, or even by health information technology developers alone, but by all of us.”

Black said the financial concerns of providers “often trumps loftier goals. Much as CMS policy has already had a marked impact on hospital readmission rates by associating them with payments, creating a direct relationship between payment and data exchange would have the same result. This could be the strongest step taken to create a genuine imperative for interoperability.”