Do We Need More or Less Healthcare IT Regulation and Legislation?

Just as I clarified last week in my post about Certification, the answer to the question “do we need more or less healthcare IT regulation and legislation” is that we need the right amount of the right regulations/legislation.Sometimes when clinicians prescribe medication, although it does therapeutic good, it creates side effects which need to be addressed by changing a dose or by adding additional medications.Such is the case with HITECH.   It was generally good medicine, but now that we’ve seen the side effects on workflow, clinician burden, and efficiency, there needs to be a dose adjustment.I was recently asked to review the “Improving Health Information Technology Act” introduced by Senator Alexander in February 2016 and placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar in April 2016.   It’s intent is good - to refine existing healthcare IT legislation with fixes that enable the right amount of the right regulation.You’ll find the summary here and the full text of the bill here.Here’s my analysis, section by section:“1)  Assisting Doctors and Hospitals in Improving Quality of Care for PatientsReduces documentation burdens by convening public and private stakeholders to develop goals, a strategy, and recommendations to minimize the documentation burden on providers while maintaining quality.”This is a good thing.   It fixes the language in HITECH which required each stage of Meaningful Use to be more stringent than the last.     ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs