Access Denied: Financial Dispute Brings Patient Care To A Crawl
By Karla Paris
Dispute brings to light the potential risks for medical practices when an EHR vendor and the practice don’t see eye to eye.
What started back on July 30 of this year, when staff at Full Circle Health Care, a northern Maine medical practice, attempted to access patient medical records but received an “access denied” notification, has brought to light risks associated with the business-side of healthcare.
Nurses and physicians at the medical facility could no longer use the system to review diabetes records, blood pressure logs, medication histories, allergy reports, lab results, along with other pertinent patient data. According to the Boston Globe, Full Circle Health Care claims that a drawn-out battle over maintenance fees led them to stop paying their monthly dues to vendor CompuGroup, a global eHealth provider that offers software and communications solutions to assist doctors, dentists, hospitals, pharmacists, associations, networks, and other service providers. The vendor shut off access to the practice’s EHR data when the debts started to mount.
CompuGroup asserts that Full Circle’s EHR access was shut off at the end of July because the practice owes more than $40,000 in back payments for maintenance. However, Full Circle disputes this claim noting that after CompuGroup purchased their original EHR vendor in 2010, Full Circle’s monthly maintenance fees jumped from $300 per month to $2,000 per month, something that the practice has been aggressively disputing with the vendor.
The Full Circle v. CompuGroup situation is rare, but certainly not all that unusual. In July of 2013, Milwaukee Health Services, a community health center in Milwaukee was denied access to 40,000 patient health records after ending a contract with its electronic health record vendor, Atlanta-based Business Computer Applications (BCA). The health center believed BCA failed to provide a fully functional EHR system.
In its complaint, Milwaukee Health Services said that in order to access medical records in the BCA system, the company did consider a temporary extension of its licensing agreement with BCA or requesting a removable disk containing the patient records. However, BCA refused to produce the records until the community health center paid nearly $300,000 for products and services. Milwaukee Health Services ended up switching to a GE Healthcare EHR platform.
With providers under pressure to adopt EHRs in order to avoid the financial penalties of meaningful use, the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) released an EHR adoption contract guide intended to steer providers away from predatory clauses in sales agreements, but as noted in the aforementioned stories, some medical providers have already fallen victim to disputes.
SOURCE: Boston Globe