Push for Safety Oversight of Electronic Medical Records is Moving at a Crawl

Nearly two years after the Obama Administration announced plans to spend $40 billion to help doctors and hospitals adopt electronic medical records, government officials are still grappling with how best to regulate these systems to assure patient safety. And a meeting this week made it clear firm rules are still many months away.

Although federal officials have acknowledged that electronic medical record systems can create new safety concerns, the administration appears content to let the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which it has contracted to study the topic, chart a path through the bureaucratic confusion “on what the federal agencies should do to maximize the safety of health information technology.” The nonprofit institute is part of the National Academies and conducts research on health topics. The directive came Dec 14 from the government’s top e-health official, David Blumenthal, during the first public meeting of an IOM committee tasked by Blumenthal’s office to come up with recommendations on how to improve the safety of electronic health records. Blumenthal asked members to issue their report by next September so that his office could use the material in drafting detailed rules for how and when the federal government will pay doctors and hospitals for using digital health systems to improve patient care.