The Obama administration's Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has taken vendors of electronic health records "to task for making it costly and cumbersome to share patient information and frustrating a $30 billion push to use digital records to improve quality and cut costs," The Wall Street Journal's Melinda Beck reports.
For example, vendors are requiring customers to use proprietary platforms and making it too expensive to switch systems. Even though nearly 80 percent of doctors and 60 percent of hospitals have converted from paper files to EHRs, only 20 to 30 percent of providers are able to share records with other providers, Beck reports.
ONC could decertify EHR systems that block data-sharing, but the report says that would unduly penalize customers, Beck reports.
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