The Government wants to store a lot more than just Basic Information in your Obamacare Electronic Health Records

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) wants to require health care providers to include “social and behavioral” data in Electronic Health Records (EHR) and to link patient’s records to public health departments, it was announced last week. 

Health care experts say the proposal raises additional privacy concerns over Americans’ personal health information, on top of worries that the Obamacare “data hub” could lead to abuse by bureaucrats and identity theft.

The CMS currently covers 100 million people through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Hospital Insurance Program and is tasked with running Obamacare. 

According to a solicitation posted by the Department of Health and Human Services on Sept. 4, the CMS is commissioning the National Academy of Sciences to study how best to add social and behavioral factors to electronic health record reporting. 

The agency said adding social and behavioral data to patients’ online records will improve health care.

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“It’s including more pay for performance requirements on physicians to collect all sorts of data in order to get government reimbursements,” he said. 

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gave authority to the CMS to pay hospitals and doctors that make the switch to electronic health records, to “encourage widespread EHR adoption.”

Health care professionals who began participating in the program in 2011 or 2012 can receive up to $44,000 for using EHRs for Medicare and $63,750 for Medicaid over 5 and 6 years, respectively. 

Though the program is “totally voluntary,” eligible professionals who are not using EHRs by 2015 will see a 1 percent reduction in their Medicare and Medicaid fees each year....

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