***News Release***

Renaming ‘Meaningful Use’ Won’t Free Doctors or Protect Patient Privacy

CMS Push to Promote Interoperability Continues to Compromise Medical Info and Impede Doctors, says Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom

PAUL, Minn.—The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is renaming the “Meaningful Use” program. The newly named “Promoting Interoperability” program will include revamped programs to address electronic health records (EHRs) interoperability, physician reporting requirements and hospital price transparency.

According to Search Health IT, the key elements of “Promoting Interoperability” were laid out by CMS administrator Seema Verma at the HIMSS 2018 conference in March, which Twila Brase, co-founder and president of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF), attended.

 Brase says this simple renaming of Meaningful Use will not free physicians and other practitioners from the grips of costly, intrusive and data-compromising government-certified EHRs and reporting requirements.

“The Meaningful Use program was created as part of the intrusive Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009,” Brase said. “We and other health freedom advocacy organizations have long resisted the program because it forces doctors to prove that they are ‘meaningfully using’ the government EHR the way the government wants it used, such as for reporting patient data. Otherwise, they face financial penalties. Embedded within the Recovery Act, HITECH provided at least $27 billion to establish a national computerized network of EHRs for data sharing—without patient consent. This damaging act has had a detrimental effect on how doctors are able to care for their patients, and how patient data is shared and compromised.”

With the government intimately involved in Americans’ health care, the EHRs are being used to put patients under surveillance and physician treatment decisions under government and other third-party controls, Brase added.

Brase exposes how EHRs have negatively affected both doctors and patients in her new book, “Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth About Electronic Health Records.”

Available this summer and published by Beaver’s Pond Press, “Big Brother in the Exam Room” will show how Congress forced doctors to install a data-collecting surveillance system in the exam room. It includes hard facts from over 125 studies and reports about the impact of EHRs on privacy, patient care, costs and patient safety. Brase’s extensive work also exposes how patient treatment decisions are controlled and tracked by the EHR; shares specific steps back to freedom, privacy and patient safety; and communicates why Americans must act now.

For more information about CCHF, visit www.cchfreedom.org, its Facebook page or its Twitter feed @CCHFreedom. Also view the media page for CCHF here. For more about CCHF’s initiative The Wedge of Health Freedom, visit www.JointheWedge.com, The Wedge Facebook page or follow The Wedge on Twitter @wedgeoffreedom.

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