The EHR Association penned a letter Jan. 28 to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, providing feedback on a draft strategy the department released in November 2018.
HHS' ONC and CMS released a draft strategy designed to help reduce administrative and regulatory burdens placed on clinicians by inefficient health IT processes. The strategy outlined three overarching issues related to clinician burden — documentation, regulatory reporting and usability issues in EHRs — and proposed solutions to address them.
The EHR Association largely supported the draft strategy, particularly measures aimed at partnering with clinical stakeholders to promote best practices for documentation, improving the usability of electronic clinical quality measures, and increasing the integration of medication histories from state prescription drug monitoring programs.
One area the EHR Association encouraged ONC and CMS to look at more closely was working to eliminate "outdated" billing and regulatory requirements from clinicians' workflows.
The group pointed at CMS' "Patients Over Paperwork" initiative, which the agency debuted in 2017, as a good first step to addressing this issue. As part of the initiative — which is focused on reducing regulatory burdens experienced by clinicians — CMS officials visited physicians across the U.S. to learn which CMS regulations they are most burdened by.
"As HHS takes important steps toward reducing clinician burden, it is important to recognize that a key contributor to the frustration of providers with EHR documentation requirements has been compliance with outdated guidelines which are geared to billing and policy requirements rather than patient care," the EHR Association wrote in its letter.
To read the EHR Association's letter in its entirety, click here.