Jayne O'Donnell
Feds push electronic records that make fraud easier
The federal government is rewarding doctors and hospitals for moving to electronic health records -- and will soon punish them if they don't -- even though these records currently make it easier for health care providers to defraud government-paid health programs, fraud experts say.
The Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general charged in December that the basic auditing safeguards that also help to prevent fraud for electronic health records (EHRs) weren't in place in many hospitals, or they were being used, but vulnerable to corruption. Yet the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services still doesn't require health care providers to keep their audit systems on.
Reed Gelzer, a former primary care doctor who is now an EHR consultant to the federal government and private groups, says that means the health records that are maintained electronically can be easily falsified, altered or otherwise misrepresented.