AHA proposed Meaningful Use Stage 2: a month to provide hospital discharge info

[natnnnat]

A friend regularly forwards me updates from e-Patients.net,
e-Patients.net is the Society for Participatory Medicine Blog. The Society also publishes the Journal of Participatory Medicine.
Their byline is "because health professionals can't do it alone".


Recent update reads as follows:

American Hospital Association declares war on patient empowerment. Please act.
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The headline above is unusually strong wording, but emails and blogs have been ablaze today with outrage at the comment letter submitted Monday by the American Hospital Association regarding the proposed regulations for Meaningful Use Stage 2. The AHA has effectively said it is neither interested in, nor capable of, giving families the information they need to care for the sick after hospitalization.

And they say Federal rules should support their position. This would utterly disempower the efforts of patients and families to engage responsibly in their families’ care.

We must speak up. This is a call to action.

Perhaps the AHA has unwittingly revealed why American hospitals are inept at discharge planning: they don’t have a grip on this vital information. We already know that 20% of Medicare patients return to the hospital within a month (NEJM 2009). The industry describes this with the delightful term “bounceback.” Families call it upsetting, distressing, heartbreaking.

The issue at hand: current regulations for Meaningful Use Stage 1 (already in force) require that we be given our records within four days, but now the AHA says that’s impossible (“not feasible,” in their words) and they want thirty days.  A month.  (The iHealthBeat article links to the AHA’s 68 page letter (PDF).)

Here’s what that means, specifically: when you or a relative is discharged from the hospital, instead of giving you your information promptly – to inform and empower good home care – they want to be allowed to spend that whole month gathering the information that might let you prevent readmission.

See the full post at:
http://e-patients.net/archives/2012/05/american-hospital-association-declares-war-on-patient-empowerment-please-act.html

where there are also options for registering your opinion regarding this issue, URLs and so forth, and some interesting comments.