[adunsulag]

Before people get their hopes up on this, remember there is no enforcement mechanism currently. OIG has to issue a final ruling on the penalties for HealthIT which I've heard from some insiders could take as long as another year. For providers, a preliminary ruling and then a final ruling has to be made which could take years.

So yes, the law mandates that your entire EHI* designated record set be made available there is NO enforcement mechanism to penalize bad actors at this point in time. Also its important to note that HealthIT and providers can make a claim to continue to block information if it falls under 8 categories (patient privacy, patient harm, financial costs, content exception such as psychotherapy notes, etc). The proposed penalty is 1 million per Information Blocking claim for HealthIT. So HealthIT has a huge incentive once the final ruling is made to make sure there is no information blocking, but providers right now don't have any kind of penalty themselves.

*EHI = Electronic Health Information, note this moves beyond the USCDI V1 standard someone mentioned in another post to the entire Designated Health Record Set including claims, payment information, imaging data, and anything that is used to make a healthcare decision by providers.

* Disclaimer I've done work for an open source EHR and I've been forced to become pretty familiar with this stuff.