Doctors Say Data Fees Are Blocking Health Reform

The exorbitant prices to transmit and receive data, providers and IT specialists say, can amount to billions a year. 

As they move to exchange patient information with hospitals and other health care partners, doctors are suffering sticker shock: The vendors of the health care software want thousands of dollars to unlock the data so they can be shared. It may take an act of Congress to provide relief. The fees are thwarting the goals of the $30 billion federal push to get doctors and hospitals to digitize health records. The exorbitant prices to transmit and receive data, providers and IT specialists say, can amount to billions a year. And the electronic health record industry is increasingly reliant on this revenue...

The additional costs were not foreseen during the bipartisan congressional push to create the federal incentive program. The expense is now imperiling the broad efforts to reform health care and adding to the host of technical obstacles that already hamper the flow of information. “I believe this to be the biggest threat to the investment the nation has made in health IT,” said David Kendrick, head of Oklahoma’s health information exchange, which links doctors, hospitals and labs in his state. “All the money spent on electronic health records has yielded only a fraction of the value of getting interoperability.” “It’s like giving everyone cellphones and not putting up a cell tower,” he added.

GOP congressional leaders are usually reluctant to intrude on business practices. But in this case, some GOP lawmakers are considering sanctions on the software vendors. “Interoperability is what makes an EHR useful,” said Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), a physician who leads the House Energy and Commerce trade subcommittee and is drawing up a bill to enforce data sharing. “It’s unfair that practitioners have to spend money on connections they thought were part of the EHR when they bought it.”...