Billing dispute leads to blocked patient data in Maine

When staffers at a tiny medical practice in far-northern Maine arrived at work one July morning and tried to view medical records for that day's patients, they got an unsettling response from their computer. “Access denied.'' As part of a billing dispute, the vendor for the clinic's electronic health records—a German corporation with U.S. headquarters in Boston—took the unusual step of blocking the staff's ability to look up medical histories on its 4,000 patients.