Rep. Phil Gingrey Comes After Healthcare Interoperability and Epic in House Subcommittee

On July 17th, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on Communications and Technology and Health (that’s a mouthful) held a hearing which you can see summarized here. Brought into question were the billions of dollars that have been spent on EHR without requiring that the EHR systems be interoperable.

In the meeting Rep. Phil Gingrey offered this comment, “It may be time for this committee to take a closer look at the practices of vendor companies in this space given the possibility that fraud may be perpetrated against the American taxpayer.”

At least Rep. Gingrey is a former physician, but I think he went way too far when he used the word fraud. I don’t think the fact that many EHR vendors don’t want to share their healthcare data is fraud. I imagine Rep. Gingrey would agree if he dug into the situation as well. However, it is worth discussing if the government should be spending billions of dollars on EHR software that can’t or in more cases won’t share data. Epic was called out specifically since their users have been paid such a huge portion of the EHR incentive money and Epic is notorious for not wanting to share data with other EHR even if Judy likes to claim otherwise.

The other discussion I’ve seen coming out related to this is the idea of de-certifying EHR vendors who don’t share data. I’m not sure the legality of this since the EHR certification went through the rule making process. Although, I imagine Congress could pass something to change what’s required with EHR certification. I’ve suggested that making interoperability the focus of EHR certification and the EHR incentive money is exactly what should be done. Although, I don’t have faith that the government could make the EHR Certification meaningful and so I’d rather see it gone. Just attach the money to what you want done.

I have wondered if a third party might be the right way to get vendors on board with EHR data sharing. I’d avoid the term certification, but some sort of tool that reports and promotes those EHR vendors who share data would be really valuable. It’s a tricky tight rope to walk though with a challenging business model until you build your credibility.

Tom Giannulli, CMIO at Kareo, offers an additional insight, “The problem of data isolationism is that it’s practiced by both the vendor and the enterprise. Both need to have clear incentives and disincentives to promote sharing.” It’s a great point. The EHR vendors aren’t the only problem when it comes to not sharing health data. The healthcare organizations themselves have been part of the problem as well. Although, I see that starting to change. If they don’t change, it seems the government’s ready to step in and make them change.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • Maybe it has something to do with the dollars:

    In a July 17 hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on Communications and Technology and Health, Gingrey (pictured) questioned whether the nation is currently on a path of interoperability or whether changes to the law need to be made. He expressed concern that, according to a recent RAND report, more than half of the $24 billion spent by the Meaningful Use program has gone to Epic, a vendor operating a “closed platform.”

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