Electronic health records may find their way into more post-acute-care settings as a result of a request for information published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
In the RFI, CMS notes that EHR adoption has been slow in the post-acute sector and asks stakeholders what it can do to accelerate the adoption of technology designed to facilitate communication among caregivers.
While EHR adoption has occurred in other areas, its use is less common in the post-acute sector, and even when used, it is used more for record-keeping than for communication among providers.
EHR use and interoperability among acute-care hospitals was funded through an economic stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which made funding available through Medicare and Medicaid, but that effort focused primarily on acute-care hospitals and physician practices, leaving post-acute-care providers and others behind. Now, CMS appears to be seeking to play catch-up in the post-acute sector and with this RFI is asking participants in that sector both how it can provide meaningful incentives for them to make greater use of EHR and how it can measure interoperability in that sector in the future.
Learn more from the article “CMS focuses on post-acute care settings in interoperability quest” on the SearchHealth IT web site and see CMS’s request for information.