Last month, information blocking penalties under the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) took effect. We know this is a challenging time of transition for many of our clients, and that you have a lot of questions about how all your suppliers, including Sharecare, fit into the picture of compliance with these new regulations. In this blog, we’ll tackle some of the most-asked questions we hear from our clients.
Is Sharecare an “actor” under the statute?
Sharecare provides fulfillment of medical record requests for facilities like yours and delivers medical records to requesters in a variety of formats, including paper, compact disc (CD), Portable Document Format (PDF), and Tag Image File Format (TIFF). Records can also be delivered via multiple electronic methods including Secure File Transfer Protocol (sFTP), secure email, and facsimile (FAX).
Even though the records Sharecare accesses to fulfill medical record requests begin in an electronic medical record (EMR) system, these requests do not fall under the umbrella of the Cures Act, as we do not grant access to Electronic Health Information (EHI) but rather make copies of the EHI. As such, Sharecare is not defined as an “actor” under the Cures Act and is not subject to the Information Blocking provisions of the Cures Act. Instead, Sharecare is considered a Business Associate for Release of Information.
How is requesting EHI different from making a records request?
When a patient or another provider makes a medical record request, they are requesting a copy of the medical record in question. Sharecare helps you fulfill these requests.
The Cures Act pertains to direct access to the EHI, and the statute prohibits blocking of EHI. To avoid information blocking under this regulation, EHI access must be provided directly through a certified Electronic Health Record (EHR). For example, if a patient requests access to their EHI this should be accomplished via your EHR patient portal. If a patient or another provider requests that EHI data be transferred to a provider, this needs to be accomplished via an interoperability framework such as Carequality or Commonwell. These scenarios are outside the current scope of the Release of Information (ROI) services that Sharecare provides.
The longer-term goal of the Cures Act is to allow for the use of Certified Application Programming Interfaces (API) to allow third-party applications to provide direct access to the patient’s EHI. In the coming months, watch this blog for more information on this topic.
What if a patient or provider mistakenly requests EHI through Sharecare?
While we generally do not receive requests for direct access to EHI, we understand this is a concern for our clients and want to assure you that we are providing ongoing training on the Cures Act and information blocking to enable our Certified Release of Information Specialists to recognize these requests. Our ROI Specialists have been trained to reach out to the appropriate person or department in your organization to re-route these requests to ensure requestors use the appropriate channels to get EHI based information. This will help you, as the responsible party (the “actor” defined in the Cures Act), know when a request has been misrouted to Sharecare and enable you and your staff to respond to the request promptly.
We will be reaching out to each of our client organizations to request a designated resource or resources to receive these requests to ensure a timely response to help your team ensure compliance and avoid information blocking.
Can we talk?
Yes! We are willing to meet with your leadership team if you need more information. Rest assured that we will continue to post educational information about this topic on this blog. Any major change like this one is bound to cause some uncertainty, so please let us know how we can help you navigate this challenging transition. This is an example of where we are All Together Better!
Reach out to your client success manager if you have any questions. Not a customer? We can help you learn more.