USA TODAY: 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…
“There have been billions spent on these systems and incentives paid to providers, but there is no private or government agency that provides oversight,” said Dan Bowerman, a Philadelphia chiropractor who has assisted in many state and federal fraud investigations… (more)
EDITOR: This is another example of how wealthy financial interests deprive the public of economical, superior health care. Instead of the federal government adopting a national prototype of electronic health care systems that would have made the transmittal of information both secure and universal, it has relied on proprietary systems.
The outcome locally is that Lancaster General Hospital, an thus the Lancaster public, has invested well over a hundred millions into a system that isn’t even that successful in transmitting information locally, according to physicians.
