Healthcare professionals griping about tech issues have a new outlet.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is launching an online portal to gather complaints about issues with usability, interoperability and patient safety related to technology.
The ONC's website will collect health IT user complaints about data-blocking or other problems with health information exchange, product usability and other health IT performance issues, as well as product safety concerns.
Usability is linked to patient safety in that health IT systems that frustrate their users can induce errors, according to safety experts.
Each complaint will be read and addressed by someone on the ONC staff, said Dr. Jon White, acting deputy national coordinator, in a blog post on the site. “We will make every effort to work with you to help address your concerns.”
The portal is the latest step the ONC has taken since 2013 to address usability and patient safety issues with electronic health-record systems.
In July, ONC contractor RTI International prepared a road map for developing a national Health IT Safety Center. The proposed center would be a public-private partnership in which vendors, providers, researchers, the government and other interested parties could “work to improve the identification and sharing of information on health IT-related safety events and hazards.”
In July 2013, the ONC released its 47-page Health Information Technology Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan, which called for patient safety organizations to be the first gathering point for health IT-related patient safety reports. But the plan said the ONC also would be looking for ways to aggregate IT safety report data from patient safety organizations into a national database.
At the same time, the ONC also issued a guide to its approved EHR certification bodies to receive and analyze patient safety complaints from the users of EHRs they certify.
The ONC has come under fire recently for lapses that researchers at the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare at MedStar Health, Washington, D.C., found in mandatory public reporting of EHR usability testing results, a requirement under the $31.3 billion EHR incentive payment program.
