A.848/S.3111 – EMRs

The New York Health Plan Association (HPA) supports A.848/S.3111, which would require providers to share health information with health plans via electronic medical records (EMRs) for purposes of improving patient care and reducing administrative delays.

Effective and efficient population health management requires access to data across every inpatient and outpatient episode of care and analytical tools that can address the payer, provider and, most importantly, the patient’s needs. Today’s health care environment needs all stakeholders to collaborate and use real time patient data and to act in the best interest of providing the highest quality of care to the patient. Increasingly, EMRs play a role in this effort.

Providers frequently cite prior authorization — the process by which providers seek approval from a health plan to deliver a specific service or treatment to a patient — as an administrative “burden” and, in recent years, numerous proposals have been introduced seeking to address this burden. Utilizing EMRs could achieve this goal by greatly facilitating the exchange of information and effectively automating the prior authorization process as well as other provider-plan interactions.

Any stakeholder — payer or provider — who agrees to take on accountability for outcomes of patient care needs to have access to the data, which is the source of truth for high quality patient care. For this reason, it is critical for all stakeholders across the health care continuum to embrace the use of EMRs as a way of reducing red tape and unnecessary costs in the system. Recognizing the range of EMRs available, it is vital that payers and providers work together to promote utilization of these tools and as stewards of the patient’s data, each party has a responsibility to share that data appropriately to improve the quality and cost of care, to reduce friction in the system and to improve the patient’s experience with the health care system.

For these reasons, HPA supports A.848/S.3111.