21st Century Cures Act guidance: How cloud-based solutions have your back

Importance of compliance

Once the final rule of the Cures Act is in place, all U.S. healthcare stakeholders will benefit in numerous ways. Most importantly, the final rule will serve to promote innovation within the healthcare system, allowing for more accurate information to be provided to both patients and providers. For that purpose alone, compliance with these guidelines should be a top priority for healthcare IT developers as well as healthcare providers.

Within these guidelines, there is a specific requirement that EHR software must comply with all regulations pertaining to the Cures Act. These guidelines will ensure that EHR software will give your patients the ability to communicate more efficiently with you, and it also supplies them with more convenient access to their health records.

Although a large part of these highly technical provisions in the rule are directed at healthcare IT developers, the information blocking provisions pertain to providers as well.

The Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons points out that the restrictions to information blocking apply to the following “actors”:

• Providers (including hospitals and physicians)
• Health IT Developers
• HIEs and HINs

As a reminder, when updating your EHR it is critical to ensure that your systems have properly implemented the new requirements of the 2015 Edition Cures Update certification criteria, as it will be a participation requirement of most Medicare Quality Reporting and Promoting Interoperability programs in the near future.

Making sure your health IT is up to date with all Cures Act regulations is beneficial for you as a provider because they equip your EHR with new information necessary to provide care more effectively.

Pitfalls of manual updates

Cures Act regulations that are rolled out will require your EHR software to be updated in order to ensure compliance is met. This can become complicated for healthcare providers who perform software updates manually because there often isn’t a large window of time between the release of final rulings and their deadlines.

Having a limited amount of time to carry out the lengthy update process creates an extensive amount of stress on practices with limited personnel. For some practices this might mean that EHR updates have to be performed after hours, causing practice staff to have to work longer than usual.

When physicians and other practice staff are faced with managing troublesome updates, it creates a stressful work environment for them and can impact their mental health. According to a recent JAMIA study, nearly 70% of providers who use EHRs during patient care have suffered from stress related issues as a result of managing and maintaining their health IT software.

The staff at your practice shouldn’t have to dedicate large blocks of their time to performing EHR updates because this makes improving patient care quality difficult and it can contribute to physician burnout.

With new upgrades being incorporated into EHR software, navigating their workflows is becoming much more efficient. Most EHR software today can fulfill automated updates to keep up with EHR regulatory compliance, and having this burden taken care of alone will improve cases of physician burnout. Furthermore, failure to comply with these guidelines could result in "appropriate disincentives” for your practice as set forth by the Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department.

The effective dates for compliance and further regulations can be found here

The need to maintain a Cures Act compliant EHR

The most effective way to make sure your EHR software is updated to comply with future Cures Act regulations is to ensure that those required updates are taken care of automatically. A cloud-based EHR will take care of the exhausting software updates for your practice, that way you will be able to focus more of your time on enhancing the well-being of your patients.

Timely, automated software updates ensure ongoing compliance and will eliminate all risk factors that exist with handling them manually.

With federal regulations from the Cures Act, there will be numerous updates happening to EHR software, and to be sure that your data isn’t at risk you can rely on a cloud-based solution to manage all data security within your practice in addition to performing regulatory software updates. Securing your valuable data in a protected data center that is catered to by vulnerability best practices ensures that your data will be safe and secure during critical times.

Managing your software updates is a job that needs to be handled with great care as your practice could become susceptible to cyber-attacks otherwise. Transitioning to a cloud-based solution places your IT developer in charge of daily security and service responsibilities – guaranteeing that your practice will have the latest version of software necessary for compliance with all Cures Act regulations.

Making the move to a cloud-based EHR will set your practice up for success. In addition to automatic updates, this solution provides secure monitoring, and it is accessible anytime from anywhere. It is imperative that your practice upgrade its EHR to either Prime Suite v21.00 or Intergy v21.00 as soon as they become available later this year. These latest versions of our EHR software solutions will be the required releases to be compliant with Cures Act regulations. It’s also important to note that all practices must be upgraded no later than December 31, 2022, in order to avoid any penalties under federal law. 

21st century cures act guidance: maintain compliance with a cloud-based solution

The Cures Act will bring forth positive outcomes for all stake-holders of the healthcare industry, but it is your responsibility to make sure your practice remains compliant with the evolving regulations.

Updating your EHR software manually is no simple task as it takes substantial amounts of time and can cost your practice a lot of money in the long run if an update is missed or not performed correctly. Moving your practice to a cloud-based EHR solution is a wonderful way for practices to remain compliant with the Cures Act if they are hoping to avoid using their own resources.