Do I Have to Comply with the Cures Act?

The short answer is yes! Discover the latest updates on the Cures Act and electronic health information requests from patients. While you may not have received many requests yet, the growing technology landscape will soon bring an influx of inquiries from third-party and health information apps.

Transcription:

It has been a long time since we have talked about the Cures Act, and information requests electronic health information requests that come from patients. Now, many of you are probably sitting there going, I really haven’t received any of these Marck. And some of you say, Well, I’ve only received a few. But we do know that with the continual growth of technology, we’re going to begin to see these requests come in from third-party apps, or from other health information apps that store this information for the patients and to really make their lives easier to consolidate all of their information.

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Now, we haven’t talked about this in a while. But it’s really important to note that one of those key deadlines was actually almost a year ago. And it was October 6 of 2022. And that is when they shifted from this concept of a small subset of information of which was still large, but it was smaller than the global perspective, to any protected health information. So all of the protected health information that you have, in your practice, this would include any kind of electronic record keeping for, say, appointments, any type of information related to billing, and payment, as well as EHR and the rest of the data set. All of those things now are included in the data that can be requested electronically by a patient. So if a patient makes a Cures Act, request for electronic or for all protected electronic health information from your practice, it would actually include all of those things. So not just your notes. But actually, the full data, set your notes, any appointment information, and payment information. Now, they can narrow that scope and ask for something more specific, maybe it’s just your notes. But typically, those requests when they begin, if they haven’t already have your practice, then you’re going to get you’re going to begin to see them be that entire data set. It’s not just a limited data set, and you have to be able to do this.

And we’re gonna touch on a future video on exactly, you know what that means for your practice. But don’t be lulled into the concept that, you know, if you don’t have a certified system, then you are compliant, that’s actually not the case, you still have to comply with the Cures Act, whether or not you have a certified system or not, doesn’t require you to get a certified system, but it does require you to be compliant, which means you have to go through the steps for both the content and manner exception as well as the infeasibility exception to be able to get away from any of these things. And neither of those are going to prevent you from providing the patient with the information that they’ve requested because that’s still required under HIPAA. And so there’s going to be additional steps. So just know that now under the Cures Act, all of those things are now included. It’s really important. We’ll catch you next week.

Additional links:

Avoiding Information Blocking: A How-To Guide To Sharing Health Information Properly
More Information Regarding the Cures Act
Webinars Regarding the Cures Act