Navigating the Maze of Electronic Health Records

Earli­er this month, the com­mit­tee pol­ished off its sixth and fi­nal hear­ing on health in­form­a­tion tech­no­logy. It’s the first time that the pan­el has ex­amined health IT in depth since 2009, when the HITECH Act meant to en­cour­age its ad­op­tion be­came law as part of the stim­u­lus pack­age and fun­nelled bil­lions in­to health IT, Chair­man Lamar Al­ex­an­der said at the in­aug­ur­al hear­ing. The hours of hear­ings shed light on elec­tron­ic health-re­cord sys­tems that can’t al­ways ex­change in­form­a­tion between vendors, some­times en­gage in in­form­a­tion block­ing, and don’t con­sist­ently give pa­tients easy ac­cess to their own health data.