Doctors Find Electronic Health Records Hard to Share

The New York Times' Julie Creswell reports on how doctors are finding barriers to sharing electronic health records because computer programs made by different companies don't share records with each other: "Doctors and hospital executives across the country say they are distressed that the expensive electronic health record systems they installed in the hopes of reducing costs and improving the coordination of patient care — a major goal of the Affordable Care Act — simply do not share information with competing systems." Doctors who are getting federal funds in support of their electronic health records must show that they can share patient data or face cuts in their Medicare reimbursements, Creswell further reports. 

One of those companies is Epic Systems, which charges a fee to send data to some non-Epic systems, Creswell notes. Epic's founder, in a rare interview, "offered muted criticism of regulators for, essentially, failing to create what she did — a contract to help providers connect to one another and a way to authenticate that only the correct person could view the patient information." Regulators are in the process of developing a standard to make health information technology interoperable.