Source: Healthcare Dive
Putting punishments in place for providers that block the exchange of electronic health information has been a complex and yearslong project for the HHS. In 2020, the Trump administration finalized regulations that officially barred information blocking, enacting key stipulations of the 21st Century Cures Act passed four years prior. The law included punishment for health IT vendors that are found information blocking — fines of up to $1 million per violation, which the HHS put in place last year — but included no such roadmap for guilty providers. As a result, regulators had difficulty landing on concrete disincentives for providers, which are the entities most frequently blamed for information blocking. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which oversees U.S. health IT, has received roughly a thousand claims of possible information blocking since April 2021. The vast majority accuse providers of blocking data exchange. The new HHS final rule lays out penalties for providers participating in three federal quality programs.