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Can't resist, from the healthit.gov FAQs:
"
It would likely be considered an interference for purposes of information blocking if a health care provider established an organizational policy that, for example, imposed delays on the release of lab results for any period of time in order to allow an ordering clinician to review the results or in order to personally inform the patient of the results before a patient can electronically access such results (see also 85 FR 25842 specifying that such a practice does not qualify for the “Preventing Harm” Exception).
To further illustrate, it also would likely be considered an interference:
- where a delay in providing access, exchange, or use occurs after a patient logs in to a patient portal to access EHI that a health care provider has (including, for example, lab results) and such EHI is not available—for any period of time—through the portal.
- where a delay occurs in providing a patient’s EHI via an API to an app that the patient has authorized to receive their EHI."
What I am saying is that if you are declining to share notes with patients, the law lays out 8 exceptions, only a few of which are relevant to us as doctors. By clicking to not share them, you are asserting that they fall under these exceptions. I would not be surprised if some tedious mandatory training that was required sometime last year officially informed you of the standard (although obviously everyone just plows through these as quickly as possible). then, if it turns out later you can't justify doing it, it's not on the institution.
Right, except you VERY conveniently omitted what the question is on that website, and the response you're quoting:
Frequently Asked Questions | HealthIT.gov
When would a delay in fulfilling a request for access, exchange, or use of EHI be considered an interference under the information blocking regulation?
So read that again. What you are quoting is a response to a question that explicitly containts a "REQUEST" from the patient.
And since you read that website, here it is, right in the FAQ (not sure how you managed to miss this. It's literally the next question):
Are actors (for example, health care providers) expected to release test results to patients through a patient portal or application programming interface (API) as soon as the results are available to the ordering clinician?
While the information blocking regulations do not require actors to proactively make electronic health information (EHI) available, once a request to access, exchange or use EHI is made actors must timely respond to the request (for example, from a patient for their test results). Delays or other unnecessary impediments could implicate the information blocking provisions.
In practice, this could mean a patient would be able to access EHI such as test results in parallel to the availability of the test results to the ordering clinician.
Please review the other questions under this heading for more information.
But whatever. Moving on.
Im going to stick with my institutions' policy. They hired real lawyers to figure all of this out.
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