Dive Brief:
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eClinicalWorks was fined $132,500 earlier this month by the Office of the Inspector General for failure to report patient safety issues to regulators within a specified timeline.
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The EHR company’s actions violated a May 2017 corporate integrity agreement with the federal government, part of a whistleblower settlement in which eClinicalWorks paid out $155 million.
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As part of the agreement, the company promised to tell OIG about reportable events, including patient safety issues or any instance of actual — or suspected — patient harm related to its software.
Dive Insight:
This latest fine comes more than a year after the company agreed to a settlement over falsification of EHR certification standards. The $155 million agreement with DOJ followed allegations the company knowingly caused providers to submit fraudulent EHR incentive payments.
As part of the corporate integrity agreement that followed, eClinicalWorks was required to report to DOJ within two days if a patient is seriously harmed or dies and to report other relevant events within seven days to either identify or resolve the problem.
This fine isn't being levied over serious patient harm, but is instead associated with the company’s failure to report patient safety issues within that latter seven-day period to the OIG, an eClinicalWorks spokeswoman told Fierce Healthcare.
The Massachusetts-based EHR vendor also violated an ancillary clause in the integrity agreement that the company report the issues to its software quality oversight organization as well.
EClinicalWorks reported the issues June 11, at which point OIG had already flagged numerous “reportable events,” according to the spokeswoman. It’s unclear what the patient safety issues actually were, or who flagged them to OIG. The agency can charge up to $2,500 per day for each day the agreement is violated, but the office has discretion over the final amount, which takes into account the actions of the company and its compliance in the matter.
More than a year since the initial agreement, some eClinicalWorks customers (out of the 80,000 facilities using their software) were still seeing issues with the system’s data transfer options and software in May.
Despite the brouhaha, the 19-year-old company is still fitting more clients under its umbrella. It announced June 5 that Advocare, a 600-provider system in New Jersey and Philadelphia, would be switching from GE Centricity to its cloud-centric EHR and Revenue Cycle Management platform.