Becker's Hospital Review

27 CIO / HEALTH IT House votes to lift ban on funding for national patient identifier By Emily Rappleye T he U.S. House of Representatives vot- ed June 12 to end the ban on using federal funds to create a national patient identifier. A national patient identifier would assign a unique number to each patient and their health record that could be used universally by all providers across the country. e House voted 246 to 178 to add an amend- ment to the 2020 HHS appropriations bill that would eliminate this ban. e amendment was offered by Rep. Bill Foster, PhD, D-Ill., who believes establishing unique patient identifiers would help reduce costs and med- ical errors, as well as tamp down on "doctor shopping," which may occur when patients are seeking opioid prescriptions, according to a news release. Opponents see the national patient identi- fier as unnecessary or a potential threat to patient safety. However, the idea has gained support across a broad spectrum of healthcare stakeholders. In a letter dated June 11, a group of healthcare organizations — including industry associa- tions, health systems and tech companies — urged House representatives to approve the Foster amendment. e lack of such a system, the stakeholders argue, has stifled innovation, added unnecessary costs to the healthcare system and created space for more medical errors to occur. "is problem is so dire that one of the na- tion's leading patient safety organizations, the ECRI Institute, named patient identification among the top ten threats to patient safety," the groups wrote. Among the organizations that signed the let- ter were Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare; Orlando, Fla.-based Nemours Children's Health System; America's Health Insurance Plans; the American Medical Informatics Association; IT security com- pany Imprivata; interoperability-focused nonprofit e Sequoia Project; and identity management soware firm NextGate. n 26 UHS hospitals experience Cerner EHR outage By Jackie Drees T wenty-six Universal Health Services hospi- tals had limited access to their Cerner-based EHR systems June 21 following "technical problems" at one of the EHR vendor's data centers, Bloomberg reported. The technical issues lasted for about two hours, and normal hospital operations have been restored, said Eric Goodwin, CIO of the King of Prussia, Pa.-based hospital management company, according to an emailed statement to Becker's Hospital Review. "Our Cerner downtime 'read only' copy of the [EHR] was not affected by this technical issue and was avail- able to the impacted locations," Mr. Goodwin said. UHS did not disclose to Bloomberg specific details regarding the technical issues, nor how many patient records were affected. A Cerner spokesperson told the publication that the issues experienced by UHS hospitals are unrelated to EHR downtime caused by a Cerner upgrade at Phoenix-based Abrazo Community Health Network. "Functionality has been restored after a client expe- rienced a brief issue caused by a technical configu- ration," a Cerner spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to Becker's on June 24. "We immediately worked with the client to bring data back online there- by resolving the matter within two hours." n Epic and Humana partner: 5 things to know By Mackenzie Garrity E lectronic health records provider Epic and health insurer Humana have teamed up to improve patient and provider communication as well as access to health information. Five things to know: 1. Humana is the first insurer to partner with Epic. The two companies aim to advance interoperability and transparency between patients and providers. As a result, Epic and Humana officials said they hope their partnership will reduce costs, im- prove quality and increase patient satisfaction. 2. Humana will integrate its real-time benefits check tool, IntelligentRx, into Epic's electronic prescribing workflow, which selects a more cost-effective treatment 40 percent of the time, according to Humana's President of Pharmacy Solutions Scott Greenwell, PharmD. 3. By integrating Epic's technology, Humana aims to im- prove physicians' timeliness and accuracy while also easing physicians' burdens. 4. Through the partnership, Epic and Humana want to in- crease the quality and timeliness of data exchange and im- prove provider access to claims support monitoring of value- based performance. 5. Additionally, Humana and Epic seek to eliminate inef- ficiencies for prior authorization decisions and provide physicians quality and cost information when they make referral decisions. n

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