Dive Brief:
- U.S. Rep Tom Price, MD (R-GA), is questioning whether taxpayers have gotten what they paid for in spending $23 billion on meaningful use incentives.
- He argues that the program currently has a top-down mindset that is ignoring important doctor and patient needs.
- To fix the program, he argues that MU administrators will need to focus on the patient, see to it that patients own their own health data, and establish and require EMR interoperability.
Dive Insight:
The industry has already made some progress in making EMRs more patient-centric, particularly when it comes to giving patients access to their data via health portals and other models. However, interoperability between EMRs, though very desirable, is still likely to be a long time coming. Until or unless an ironclad standard is established — which will be very tricky to pull off — vendors will continue to do things in a way that locks providers into proprietary technology that doesn't interoperate.