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.
PS: Note that our British friends are again victims of a psychotic rampage – seven dead and 21 in critical condition. In the midst of an election that conveys the future of the NHS, which has been tattered and struggling, surgeons and physicians race in to treat crush injuries, deep facial stabbings and lacerations, all sorts of horrors. Who is fighting to save these lives? The same disreputable bunch, those Doctors (ugh) who are getting whipped about with the same, if not worse, performance mandates.
If they had to fly in doctors from across the country because they did not staff them well enough at home, well – who’s to blame? Or if they’ve been using locums, and got caught in a shift of covering surgeons, well, who’s to blame?
I’ll bet some pinhead at the BMJ/NHS will review the records of those who were treated – especially those who had bad outcomes – and find shocking deficiency in the medical records. People will nod sagely – and then cut the NHS budget again, with the warning to try better next atrocity.
They are no more sane across the pond than we are here.
It is very important to manufacture meaningless standards, or else there would be no way to disclose shocking noncompliance with standards. Impeding the actual delivery of service? That’s so old-fashioned a concept! It’s better to place control strings into the body of the Healthcare Assembly Line to speed up the belt, and show how poor the care is, when measured by measurements designed to show poor care.
It’s a similar technique as finding the average employee performing at below-average targets – it’s a great excuse!
Meaningful use is a brilliant phrase – I’m sure that Orwell would be jealous.
If something is not worth doing in the first place, it certainly is not worth doing well.
Wait until MACRA goes into full effect. More fraud to come.
So a gov’t snoop is paid a huge bounty for fingering a vendor with deep pockets over some nebulous standards that are no good to anyone except the enforcers. What kind of uptight, mirthless commissariat is the “Division of Health Care Access”, and what sort of loser would even want to work for them? Everyone will pile on to a (maybe) corrupt company while ignoring the larger corruption of gov’t-directed health care.