Cures Rule

I am really irritated. My hospital has told me they’re not supporting the federally required FHIR standard (a “FHIR endpoint”) to let me access my health data. Is this legal??

—————

Important update: a robust Twitter thread is drawing lots of answers on whether this is legal. Some of it is “gray area” but among other things:

At present, even if their behavior is a violation, there’s no penalty!
But by end of 2023, if they don’t have this, they might not get any more payments from CMS!
- That’s Medicare and Medicaid, which are about 40% of all US hospital revenue
There are three separate requirements.
- System vendors are required (today) to offer a FHIR endpoint to their buyers (hospitals).
  - Well-known large vendors like Epic and Cerner offer it.
  - But Beth Israel Deaconess is its own system developer, and they haven’t created one.
- Care providers (hospitals etc) aren’t required to buy them and offer them to patients (yet)
- But by end of 2023, providers will have to offer this to patients, if they want to get paid by CMS (Medicare).

—————

Resuming the original post:

[Read more…]

Patient voices have been working for decades to achieve access to their medical records, which have always been locked up in the hospital. No more: new rules went into effect on October 6 that mean all your health data must be available for download by apps, online, by end of year.

This so-called “Cures Rule” is part of the continuing work of the 21st Century Cures Act enacted by Congress in 2015. The Act includes many other things to improve development of cures, but for patients a vital new requirement is that health data must now move easily between computers. It’s common sense for everyone in healthcare, and for patients it’s an immense win for justice (fairness): at last we can see about ourselves what the people treating us can see.

[Read more…]

Is Beth Israel lying, denying, or complying?

“From #73cents to FHIR”: keynote at the Redox Connect customer conference