Mr. Fax Goes to Washington: Episode 2

Mr. Fax Goes to Washington is a 4 episode series podcast brought to you by eFax Corporate and hosted by Sr. VP John Nebergall.

Join us as we release the series each day this week. Today Episode 2.

In February of this year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed policy changes for sharing clinical data by releasing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) informing the healthcare community of a new rule on (among other things) interoperability–the method by which healthcare professionals securely exchange medical documents. As you probably know, CMS is the department that oversees payments to providers through Medicare and falls under the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) department.

Upon close review, eFax Corporate discovered that an important provision of the proposed new rule had the potential to impact unintentionally the delivery of care for many providers who use digital cloud-fax technology (DCFT) to exchange patient information, order medications, and receive test results from labs. This not only led to submitting formal comments but actual trips to Washington DC to meet with the rule makers and congressional representatives to advocate and educate on the impacts of this omission to this rule.

Episode 2: An Overview of the Proposed Rule – This episode gives an overview of the current proposed rule and how these rules will affect providers using digital fax technology. The episode also takes a look back at how HHS and CMS have used rulemaking to change provider behavior in adopting health IT technology and the impact of this approach as the industry moves toward Interoperability.