The last word Congress is final hurdle in removing EHR ‘gag clauses’
Congress will likely move to forbid non-disclosure clauses in EHR contracts with healthcare providers, but final action won’t occur until 2016 when the House and Senate come together to align their different, more far-ranging proposals on EHRs.
The issue of non-disclosure clauses, which forbid providers from talking about software glitches such as treatment alerts not displaying correctly or other issues related to patient safety, first surfaced in a 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report.
It came to the fore again this spring during consideration of the 21st Century Cures Act in the House of Representatives under the broader heading of information blocking. The American Medical Association stated its support for a ban on non-disclosure clauses in a letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in May.
In early October, Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Transparent Ratings on Usability and Security to Transform Information Technology (TRUST IT) Act of 2015, which also calls for a ban on gag clauses.
The 21st Century Cures Act passed the House in July and awaits Senate action. If the Senate passes a different EHR bill, the two must then go to a House-Senate conference committee where differences will be hammered out. Or the House could opt to pass the Senate bill.
While lauding provisions of the Cassidy-Whitehouse Senate bill, Leslie Krigstein, vice president of congressional affairs with the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), thinks the measure could eventually be linked with one that Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Health, Education Labor & Pensions Committee, has been pushing under the broad umbrella of healthcare innovation.
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