Senate health committee Chairman Lamar Alexander and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma on Thursday met with members of the Center for Medical Interoperability in Nashville, to highlight the Center’s work to make it easier for health technologies, such as electronic health records and medical devices, to exchange information.
“There is not much more difficult than getting your personal medical information from one doctor’s office to another,” Senator Alexander said.
“Sometimes it seems like the surest way to do it is to carry it in a wheelbarrow. Nashville is at the center of making it easier for patients to access their electronic health records and for doctors and hospitals to get the information they need to treat their patients.
“One such effort is the Center for Medical Interoperability, a group of non-profit, for-profit, and university-based hospitals. Their idea was, among them, they have a large enough purchasing power to be able tell the makers of electronic health record systems and medical devices they want systems that work properly and are able to communicate with each other. And if the systems don’t perform properly, they will find products that do and buy them from someone else. I was glad to show Administrator Verma how these hospitals have come together to work out a private sector solution to improve the way electronic health records and medical device systems work.”
“Putting patients in control of their health records is a priority for CMS and for the whole Trump Administration,” said Ms. Verma. “Senator Alexander has been a leader for many years in improving electronic health records, and I was happy to come to Nashville today to see all of the great work being done at the Center for Medical Interoperability and in this community to empower patients and put them in control of their healthcare.”
Senator Alexander and Ms. Verma held roundtables with members of the Nashville Health Care Council and members of the Center for Medical Interoperability to hear about their work, as the Administration looks at ways make it easier for patients to access their health information. Alexander and Verma then toured the Center.
The Senate health committee chaired by Senator Alexander held six hearings in 2015 looking at ways to improve electronic health records and formed a bipartisan working group that made recommendations that were included in the 21st Century Cures Act that was signed into law in December 2016.
At an October hearing on the health IT provisions in Cures, Senator Alexander explained the importance of having electronic health records systems that work: “In 2015, a family doctor in Kingsport, Tennessee, explained to the New York Times the problems he and others face with electronic health records systems saying, ‘We have electronic records at our clinic, but the hospital, which I can see from my window, has a separate system from a different vendor. The two don’t communicate. When I admit patients to the hospital, I have to print out my notes and send a copy to the hospital so they can be incorporated into the hospital’s electronic records.’ The exchange of information between electronic health records systems is called interoperability. In the case of the doctor from Kingsport, and many others across the country, this exchange of information does not always happen easily, or at all.”