Amid Virus Crisis, Officials Announce Health Care Tech Rules

With coronavirus topping Americans’ concerns, senior Trump administration officials tried to switch subjects by announcing final rules aimed at delivering on the unfulfilled promise of electronic health records.

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It did not go smoothly as reporters veered back to the global outbreak increasingly affecting U.S. communities.

“The notion that we can’t do our day jobs and work on this very serious issue (coronavirus) is absurd,” said a frustrated Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar after one reporter noted that financial markets had opened sharply lower over fears of global economic damage from the outbreak.

Azar recapped administration actions to try to contain the spread of the virus in the U.S., develop tests, treatments and vaccines, work with local officials in areas that are seeing outbreaks, and care for the sick. Announcement of the technology rules was originally planned at a health care conference in Florida, but that event was canceled over coronavirus concerns.

The long-awaited rules could take several years for consumers and patients to start seeing the practical effects. They are intended to get at one of the major problems with electronic health records: the systems of hospitals and doctors often don’t ‘talk’ to each other, and patients struggle to get their medical information digitally transmitted, defaulting to CDs and faxed paper records.