Source: Association of Health Care Journalists
Thursday, Oct. 6, marked another milestone for patients seeking access to information in their electronic health records. That’s the date federal information-blocking regulations expanded to enable patients’ access to all electronic protected health information (ePHI) in designated record sets. With some medical organizations pushing back on the deadline saying smaller medical centers aren’t ready for this or are unaware of the requirement (see below), journalists could find interesting stories querying hospitals to find out how they got ready for this requirement or how it’s going, or interview patients seeking information from their records and find out how easy it was to get that data. “October 6th is a big day because we’re saying if data is electronically accessible — meaning it’s on a computer system somewhere in your hospital — you’re required to make it available,” said Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for health information technology at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), during an Oct. 6 episode of the podcast Tradeoffs. “You might start to see…nursing notes or operative notes from a surgery or images from a last imaging.”