News

“As Congress looks to enhance the nations capacity to respond to this pandemic, improving patient matching will be critical,” said Ben Moscovitch, project director for health information technology at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

She recommended that people keep a hard copy and their own electronic copy of their documents, because they don’t automatically transfer in electronic health records.

Over the last few years, our institution has been tracking amendment requests, and we have noted an increase in the number of formally submitted Problem List requests regarding diagnoses, wrote Amy Porter, MD, of the Rainbow Center for Comprehensive Care and the corresponding author. Amendment requests are not always clear-cut; clinicians and patients disagree over whether an amendment accurately reflects the patients condition.

In this issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, the study by Latulipe et al3 found that only two-thirds of the US hospitals they surveyed offered adult patients the option of granting portal access to a care partner, and among hospitals that did, the process for obtaining proxy credentials was often difficult and time consuming. Moreover, their findings highlight a long-standing practice that has troublesome implications for patient privacy: personnel in almost half of the hospitals suggested to the study’s interviewers (who acted as secret shoppers) that the care partner use the patient’s credentials to review health records.

More widely, patient confidence will also be an important aspect of any preparation for post-COVID healthcare, said Dr Dilruwan Chaminda Herath, executive medical director UK and Ireland for MSD, who also contributed to the Public Policy Projects discussion. The new normal for patient pathways will have been transformed. Collaboration between stakeholders and focus on the synergy between different disciplines will be central to services getting up and running again and the emphasis must be on the total patient.

Collaborating now can help promote interoperability.

A big change was the reimbursement of audio only telehealth which also applies retroactively to March 1, 2020:CMS previously announced that Medicare would pay for certain services conducted by audio-only telephone between beneficiaries and their doctors and other clinicians. Now, CMS is broadening that list to include many behavioral health and patient education services. CMS is also increasing payments for these telephone visits to match payments for similar office and outpatient visits. This would increase payments for these services from a range of about $14-$41 to about $46-$110. The payments are retroactive to March 1, 2020.

“The main driver here is our consumer expectation that what we’re getting in healthcare isn’t matching up to what we’re getting in other aspects of our lives,” he said. “The patients have a right to that data, for the patients to control and move as they desire, rather than under the control of the providers and payers.”

Topol said real-world evidence drawn from computerized records of COVID patients, while not as reliable as a clinical trial, is still very useful to help guide medical decisions.Medical data has been hard to tease out because much of it resides in electronic silos, which government officials have not required technology companies to open up and eliminate.

Specifically, the final rules call for payers to provide healthcare data to patients through the use of FHIR-based APIs, as well as using a similar methodology to make provider directories available to patients. The CMS rule mentions two implementation guides developed by the Da Vinci Project “that support the policies that we have finalized in this rule,” she said.“While these implementation guides are not requirements of the rule, we believe they will significantly support and improve the implementation of these APIs on the part of payers,” Mugge added.Implementation guides are standardized codes and approaches that give organizations across the healthcare industry a specific way to use FHIR to achieve certain capabilities.