On March 24, 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report describing the challenges facing users of Electronic Health Records (EHR) seeking to electronically exchange health information. According to the GAO’s report, issues arise because of “insufficient standards [for EHR], concerns about how privacy rules can vary among states, difficulties in matching patients to their records, and costs associated with [the] exchange [of health information].” For example, GAO cited provider complaints about EHR systems that lack interoperability to share information and costs associated with purchasing and implementing EHR systems. In response to these findings, GAO recommended that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology “(1) develop and prioritize specific actions . . . to advance health information exchange, and (2) develop milestones with time frames for the actions to better gauge progress toward advancing exchange, with appropriate adjustments over time.”
