Poll: Americans want health information shared easily among docs

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say it's very important that their critical health information can be easily shared among healthcare providers, a survey from the Society of Participatory Medicine reveals.

In addition, 87 percent of respondents oppose any fees being charged to either healthcare providers or patients for that transfer of information to take place.

The 1,011 adults polled were selected randomly from landline and cell phone numbers.

Nearly 20 percent of respondents said they or a family member had experienced a problem in receiving care because records could not easily be shared among providers.

Doctors are forced to pay anywhere between $5,000 to $50,000 to set up connections with blood and pathology laboratories, health information exchanges or governments, according to a recent Politico story. Sometimes additional fees are charged each time a doctor sends or receives data.

Just this week, Peter DeVault, director of interoperability at Epic Systems, revealed at a Senate committee hearing that the company charges $2.35 per patient, per year for Epic EHR clients to exchange data with other providers.

"We have the technology. What we need is for health care providers and systems developers to put patient interests ahead of business needs. None of them would exist were it not for the patients," Daniel Z. Sands, M.D., co-founder and co-chair of the Society of Participatory Medicine, says in the survey announcement.

Experts at the Senate committee hearing testified that vendors and healthcare organizations use patient data as a competitive advantage, and that data-sharing is less likely to occur in competitive markets.

In a paper from the Brookings Institution, Niam Yaraghi, a fellow in governance studies at the Center for Technology Innovation, posits that the fee-for-service reimbursement model serves as a disincentive to share data. He also argues that Stage 3 of the Meaningful Use program will likely set the interoperability bar too low and likely will help only the dominant vendors, who will need only to provide a minimum amount of interoperability.

To learn more:
- find the announcement