On August 1, 2022, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced final changes to its payment program for acute care hospitals in 2023. The FY 2023 Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) final rule also included policies for the 2023 Medicare Promoting Interoperability Program, which rewards eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs) for the meaningful use of certified electronic health record (EHR) technology, and for the Inpatient Quality Reporting Program, which requires hospitals to report data in key areas.  

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ONC recently held a health care provider-focused workshop and guided discussion on opportunities and challenges related to sharing electronic health information (EHI). More than 200 people involved with utilizing health information technology (health IT) to share EHI participated in the half-day workshop. They also provided perspectives on October 6, 2022, when the definition of “information blocking” no longer limits its focus to the subset of EHI represented by data elements in the United States Core Data for Interoperability version 1 (USCDI v1).

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The pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed gaps in the nation’s public health infrastructure that pose challenges to effective communication between health care providers and public health agencies.  According to ONC analyses of nationally representative survey data from hospitals and physicians collected in 2019, over 70% of hospitals experienced at least one major challenge with electronic public health reporting and less than 1 in 5 primary care physicians—and about a quarter of pediatric and internal medicine primary care physicians—reported electronically exchanging data with public health agencies.

The post Electronic Public Health Reporting among Hospitals & Physicians in the Year Prior to the Pandemic: Implications for Health Equity & Pandemic Response appeared first on Health IT Buzz.