Senate Republicans said the Obama administration has botched a plan to make all health records go electronic.
The lawmakers were dismayed by several problems surrounding the “meaningful use” program, created in 2009 to give physicians and hospitals money for adopting health information technology. If doctors or hospitals don’t adopt electronic health records from government-certified vendors, they will face cuts in their Medicare payments, starting initially with 1 percent and moving up from there.
“The administration seems to have rushed the process with its penalties,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Deadlines for adopting electronic records have been repeatedly delayed because hospitals and doctors are struggling to implement the systems, Alexander said during a committee hearing Tuesday.
The second stage of meaningful use was delayed for certain healthcare providers through 2016. In that stage, doctors and hospitals must be able to let patients view and download their health information.
Some doctors are choosing to take the penalty, which is a 1 percent overall cut to Medicare reimbursements, rather than wade through the regulatory requirements, Robert Wergin, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said at the hearing.
Alexander cited several hospitals that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to implement and continuously update new systems. Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., spent $400 million over the last few years to get its various IT systems to talk to each other, but only received $28 million in incentive payments, he said.
Democrats on the panel cited progress with program, with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., saying that 70 percent of doctors now use electronic health records as opposed to 18 percent a few years ago.
Others were more critical. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., called for “rebooting” the program, and include “behavioral health and nursing homes.”
The hearing could portend what type of legislation Republicans and Democrats could issue on health IT. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, issued a draft bill recently that addresses interoperability problems among health IT systems.
