Regulators focus on reducing physician EHR burden
National Coordinator Don Rucker on why figuring out system problems is similar to diagnosing a patient’s illness
Solving the long-standing puzzle that is lack of interoperability among electronic health records (EHRs) requires computer system savvy as well as knowledge about improving patient care.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) may, then, have the right person to guide it in Don Rucker, MD. Rucker, named to the post in March 2017, is skilled in informatics, board certified in emergency and internal medicine and built an early version of an EHR nearly two decades ago.
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Medical Economics spoke with Rucker at the ONC’s recent annual conference in Washington, D.C. about his vision for healthcare IT and how to address his peers’ frustrations with EHRs, among other topics.
Medical Economics: Physicians remain frustrated with EHRs. What is the ONC doing to enable these systems to truly improve patient care?
Don Rucker, MD: I think ONC has a couple of roles in reducing what we call provider burden, specifically physician burden.
There are legal things. The most recent is the 21st Century Cures Act passed in December 2016, which has the requirement that CMS [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] and ONC work together to actually really start this process by defining what the burdens are. Truth be known, we are well on our way to working on not just defining it, but also reducing it. It’s complex.
I think when ONC looks at it, there’s a couple of things going on when we talk about EHR burden. It is similar to a patient with four chronic illnesses. That’s the way I look at EHR provider burden. It’s the patient with bad hypertension, who has had a stroke, had diabetes, has heart failure and is on steroids-that’s my view of what this is.
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So you have to think about what can I do for each of these things? It is very, very clinical. The burden is multi factorial and you need to diagnose each of the components.
When you look at [EHR burden] clinically, another “disease” is that some things come down to “software is hard to do, so can we facilitate doing that?” The providers who work with the software companies don’t often understand what they are telling software developers.
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