Mr. Fax Goes to Washington is a 4 episode series podcast brought to you by eFax Corporate and hosted by Sr. VP John Nebergall.
In February of this year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed policy changes for sharing clinical data by releasing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) informing the healthcare community of a new rule on (among other things) interoperability–the method by which healthcare professionals securely exchange medical documents. As you probably know, CMS is the department that oversees payments to providers through Medicare and falls under the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) department.
Upon close review, eFax Corporate discovered that an important provision of the proposed new rule had the potential to impact unintentionally the delivery of care for many providers who use digital cloud-fax technology (DCFT) to exchange patient information, order medications, and receive test results from labs. This not only led to submitting formal comments but actual trips to Washington DC to meet with the rule makers and congressional representatives to advocate and educate on the impacts of this omission to this rule.
Episode 1: Going to Washington to advocate DCFT – When regulators proposed a rule change that threatened to exclude cloud-fax technology from the national push for interoperability of personal healthcare information and electronic health records, J2 Global (J2), provider of eFax Corporate, wasted no time.
Episode 2: An Overview of the Proposed Rule – This episode gives an overview of the current proposed rule and how these rules will affect providers using digital fax technology. The episode also takes a look back at how HHS and CMS have used rulemaking to change provider behavior in adopting health IT technology and the impact of this approach as the industry moves toward Interoperability.
Episode 3 – DCFT as an Accepted Interoperability Protocol – This episode looks at the uses and value of digital cloud fax technology (DCFT), and the role it can play in achieving Interoperability. Agreeing with CMS that paper must be eliminated in exchanging patient health information, DCFT is an effective, secure, and low cost solution for most providers already have the infrastructure.
Episode 4: Impact on Rural Providers and Health Care Systems and the Conclusion – By not recognizing DCFT as a protocol this disproportionately impacts rural and underserved urban communities who rely on low cost methods to share health data securely.
Listen to the Episodes
Learn more about the series and host on the program’s page.
Read the eFax Corporate article on the issues.
Read John’s blog post on his trip.
Hear John’s interview with Jim Tate on The Tate Chronicles.
This article was originally published on HITECH Answers.