Faking Meaningful Use Data

Recently, eClinicalWorks agreed to pay $155 million to settle a lawsuit it faked meaningful use certification.

The DOJ alleges that eClinicalWorks opted to added the 16 drug codes necessary for certification into its software rather than enable the product to access those from a complete database, failed to accurately record user actions with audit log functionality, did not always accurately record diagnostic imaging orders or conduct drug-drug interaction checks and, finally, eClinicalWorks did not satisfy data portability requirements designed to enable doctors to transfer patient data to over vendor’s EHRs.

To be honest, I am not really sure what this means because the whole meaningful use is a fake in itself. It has done nothing to improve healthcare.  I do bet this is the tip of the iceberg, though, of companies finding ways to game the system. I see more of these settlements coming especially when I see this:

The lawsuit was originally filed by whistleblower Brendan Delaney, who at the time was a software technician at the New York City Division of Health Care Access and Improvement. He will receive approximately $30 million as part of the resolution.

Some technician is going to get quite popular soon.   No more dungeons and dragons for him or her.