California Hospitals Fight EHR Bill

The California Hospital Association is fighting a legislative attempt to require a "track changes"-type function for electronic health records, saying the benefits aren't worth the additional cost.

State Sen. Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco, is sponsoring the bill in response to a case in which someone altered the electronic medical records of a patient who had died. State health investigators discovered that someone had erased relevant portions of the dead woman's computer medical records. In addition, a nurse had been instructed to retroactively include notes describing the patient's care. The woman died following knee surgery at Stanford University Medical Center.

The bill calls for tracking changes made to EHRs and keeping a record of who made them, according to a report this week by California Watch, a project of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. Patients would be able to see changes to their records, as well.

In a letter to Leno, the California Hospital Association argued that "the frequency of the problem addressed in this bill does not make the cost justified at this time when hospitals are focused on achieving sustainable health information exchange and in demonstrating federally defined meaningful use of clinical data."

Hospitals would have to pay millions of dollars to revise EHRs already in place, the association says. It also argues that the measure would cause major delays in implementing new EHR systems.

The bill is scheduled to be heard Tuesday by the California State Assembly's Health and Judiciary Committee. The Senate passed the bill on May 31.