Dive Brief:
- The Office of the Inspector General for HHS has released a report critical of what it sees as a lack of sufficient oversight of EHR use.
- The OIG asserts that despite spending more than $20 billion on incentives to adopt EHRs, CMS has paid relatively little attention to addressing possible fraud and abuse; Medicare, in fact, has not changed the way it tries to detect fraud since EHRs became commonly used.
- The report was particularly tough on lack of guidelines on how to address the copy and paste function, which makes it fast and easy for doctors to upcode, it suggests. Earlier government estimates have suggested that hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud is taking place.
Dive Insight:
I'm a bit disheartened by this news. On the one hand, it is to be expected that the government will want to avoid even the appearance that EHR fraud and abuse aren't important. On the other, I'd wager that so-called cloning is far from the biggest fish OIG should fry when it comes to monitoring EHR use. It would be a shame if the OIG and CMS spent a lot of energy harassing and scaring already burned-out doctors who are just trying to get their job done. Let's focus on people who are really trying to defraud the system, shall we?