The American Health Information Community has recommended that the Health and Human Services Department lead an effort to build regulatory compliance into e-health records, along with the data needed for quality measurement, pay for performance and other administrative programs.

The community, an HHS advisory panel that was holding its last meeting, called for the department to reduce redundancy in information-gathering by creating EHR templates that would help users provide the information needed for various purposes.

AHIC's e-health records workgroup generated the recommendation. Dr. Jonathan Perlin, chief medical officer of Hospital Corporation of America and co-chair of the workgroup, said the idea is to make EHRs "as iconic and central [to the work of health care providers] as the stethoscope."

Having so many disparate information collection requirements hinders adoption of EHRs, the workgroup said in a letter to HHS.

The plan is for HHS to convene an expert panel to determine what medical and related data is required for regulatory, licensing, accreditation, quality reporting and payment purposes. "The expert panel should determine how these requirements can be most efficiently met using HIT/EHRs without imposing undue burden on clinicians already documenting information for clinical care purposes," the recommendation states.

HHS should support an effort to create standardized and structure templates, then make those templates available to EHR vendors and others involved in EHR design, it states.

AHIC also is recommending that HHS establish a national repository of EHR templates already developed and used for clinical purposes. For example, Perlin said, the repository might contain templates for heart failure, so that health care providers could standardize the information they collect on such patients and meet legal and financial requirements for documentation.

The templates would be based on guidelines for documentation of quality care, he said.

Perlin said HHS could develop a repository of templates for administrative data collection through EHRs and another for clinical care templates, or it could store both in a single repository.

AHIC also advised HHS to develop and make available a standard methodology for measuring the direct and indirect costs of adopting EHRs in hospital settings.