Policy letter to U.S. HHS on their Draft Strategy on Reducing Burden Relating to the Use of Health IT and EHRs

UCSF’s Center for Digital Health Innovation appreciates the Department’s proposed strategies and recommendations to reduce regulatory and administrative burdens for clinicians. We focus instead on the half that is missing from the draft strategy: the experiences of and reducing the burdens on America’s patients. The Department notes that it must improve the experience of both clinicians and patients, and put patients at the center of care, yet the draft focuses only on clinicians’ burdens and fails to address patients’ burdens. Even with respect to clinicians’ burdens, the draft omits to assess how the strategies and recommendations to reduce clinicians’ burdens might concurrently increase burdens on and barriers to access for America’s patients. We recommend that the Department revisit the draft strategy, consider as well the burdens and adverse impacts upon patients, and develop an integrated approach that considers and, where necessary, balances the respective impacts and burdens upon clinicians and patients.