Change is bad. Sudden change is even worse. Let’s say, hypothetically, you put your phone through an entire washing machine cycle. Even if you love your clothes smelling like a smartphone, the price tag of a new phone without a trade-in is shocking. Jerry Seinfeld must have trouble with change too. He did all that solid tv work – he even managed to get Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, and Sarah Silverman on his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee show. But Jerry is going back on tour to relive his stand-up days. Change in the health care system is challenging too, so we talk about that in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
Some news about changes in the health information policy space — we will let you decide if it is good or bad:
- At least 22 health systems are charging fees to respond to patient’s electronic messages if they require medical expertise and take longer than a few minutes to answer. John Hopkins, for instance, started charging $10-$50 on July 18, 2023, for responding to patient messages in the patient portal MyChart. More here.
- Microsoft and Epic are getting very serious about integrating conversational, ambient, and generative AI into the EHRs ecosystem so that everyone’s doctor will be using AI as part of their medical record system soon.
- Cigna plans to eliminate prior authorization requirements for hundreds of procedures in its commercial health plans. This decision comes three months after the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Republican Committee members launched an investigation into the alleged inappropriate automation of coverage decisions. United Healthcare announced the same thing two weeks ago.
Jerry Seinfeld is back on tour, going to the places that really need to laugh — like Peoria, Illinois and Albany, New York. Makes sense for Jerry to go back to his comfort zone, even if that is not the way to get your jokes to millions of people at once. Apparently, the federal government is going to allow electronic health record holders to go back to their comfort zones too. Formidable health policy influencers are debating how to best implement the nationwide health data exchange known as TEFCA — one of the many terrible acronyms in health care that mostly means “we are trying to allow everyone to have fast access to patient information who needs it, no matter who has it, so our health care system works better.” We are reserving our judgment for now, but the debate boils down to this: the federal agency writing the TEFCA rules is allowing record-holders to use old data standards and charge fees in a bid to get them to participate in the nationwide exchange program. Some people think this is necessary and some people (here, here, here) think it would undermine the entire purpose of TEFCA: to engineer the free and simple exchange of health information. These two sides seem pretty far apart. But as Jerry Seinfeld knows, there is no difference between something that sucks and something that’s great.
