By Anne Zieger
Dive Brief:
- A small medical practice in northern Maine has been blocked from accessing patient medical records because its EMR vendor has shut them off.
- Vendor CompuGroup says the practice, Full Circle Health Care, won’t get access to its records back until it pays $20,000 in overdue charges to the vendor.
- The medical group acknowledges that it stopped paying CompuGroup $2,000 per month in monthly fees 10 months before the July shut off, but said that was after months of attempting to address what the practice considered to be exorbitant, unexpected maintenance fees and charges for hardware that didn’t arrive.
Dive Insight:
To date, there is no regulation in place that specifically holds that the company hosting an EMR can’t shut off the access to the clinical data the practice uses. And it may not have come up yet because the medical practice in question is in a somewhat unusual situation in which its prior vendor got bought out by larger one and changed the terms of the agreement substantially.
But as the practice suggests, it’s possible that harm to patients could come if an EMR vendor decides to simply cut off access to patient records. If this becomes a trend, it’s possible regulators and legislators would need to step in and take steps requiring EMR vendors to settle their financial disputes with providers in some other way. Otherwise, they leave patients open to inadequate or even dangerous care given that providers in such a situation may not have crucial information.
