HHS details strategy to reduce burden of electronic health records

HHS WANTS TO REDUCE the effort it takes providers to put information in electronic health records and meet regulatory requirements, according to a new draft strategy.

To achieve those goals, HHS, led by the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, recommended simplifying Quality Payment Program and Promoting Interoperability reporting requirements, standardizing clinical information in EHRs, and improving the user experience of software for better workflows.

These, among other pro- cesses, can help fix the problem of inefficient EHRs that aren’t user-friendly, which can lower productivity, increase costs and put patient safety at risk, according to the report, Strategy on Reducing Regulatory and Administrative Burden Relating to the Use of Health IT and EHRs.

The document, with recommendations that reflect both already completed work and work that remains to be done, was required by the 21st Century Cures Act. The report takes into account feedback HHS has gathered from payers, providers, vendors and others.

HHS focused on four areas in the report: clinical documentation, user experience of health IT, EHR reporting and public health reporting. Standardization cuts across topics in the report. To improve clinical documentation workflows, for instance, the CMS could not only decrease requirements but could also standardize prior authorization and other processes. User experience could benefit from standardization, too. HHS suggested that vendors standardize elements of their software, including order entry content.

The agency also suggested that developers create standards that make it easier to pull data from health IT software. One standard could be FHIR, according to the report, which highlighted the use of FHIR by a “major consumer technology” company—Apple presumably—to let patients download their records.

The CMS will also play a role in cutting down on EHR-related burdens, according to the report. The agency has already reduced required measures for the Promoting Interoperability reporting category under MIPS. But the agency could go further by simplifying scoring in the

● category, according to the report.