‘The biggest upgrade in health care IT’ is approaching: Are PCPs prepared?
WASHINGTON — On Dec. 31, all certified electronic health record companies are required to implement upgraded technology with interoperability, allowing providers to easily transmit patient information across networks, according to a speaker.
This requirement is part of the 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law in 2016, Aneesh Chopra, MPP, former assistant to the president and chief technology officer, and co-founder and president of CareJourney, a health care analytics solutions firm, said during the Primary Care Collaborative (PCC) annual meeting.
The technology is known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), an application programming interface (API). CMS recently finalized a rule in the Physician Fee Schedule that states all physicians must “turn on this technology” by September, Chopra said.
“We’re in the middle of the biggest upgrade in health care IT since the beginning of the high-tech era,” he said. “If you run a primary care clinic, ask your EHR vendor when they choose to ship this technology to you.”
Chopra then asked the room full of primary care clinicians, “Does anyone know when you’re getting a Cures Act EHR upgrade? Or if you can make the September deadline?”
Very few attendees raised their hands.
“That is a problem,” he said.
According to Chopra, the FHIR API will provide a “universal language” where thousands of EHR systems can “speak to each other.”
“These APIs are now required of every piece of software that you will use from 2023 on,” Chopra said. “We wanted to make sure you could share data at the population level. I am worried that not a lot of folks know about it. But the good news is that foundation is ready for us to get to work.”
He encouraged attendees to modernize their EHR systems to ensure they will be interconnected after the upgrade. The next generation of EHR systems, he added, will allow physicians to “more easily program it, like an Excel spreadsheet, so it doesn’t require a PhD in physics to make your life a little bit better.”
At the end of his talk, Chopra said he has reason to hope that the transformation of health information technology will be successful because of the shift away from fee-for-service toward value-based care, which has been shown to generate savings. During a separate presentation at the PCC meeting, Doug Jacobs, MD, MPH, chief transformation officer in the Center for Medicare at CMS, cited data that showed value-based accountable care organizations comprising 75% or more primary care physicians had a savings per capita of $281.
“If we move to value, we can take responsibility to reallocate those dollars,” Chopra said. “Natural and economic forces will put more resources into primary care so you can do your work, not through one-time grant funding, but by the core DNA of how the model works.”