04/29/2015     Raymond F Posa, MBA

EMR Company Holding Records Hostage (Edward W Carver, DPM)

Unfortunately Dr. Carver, EMR companies are not
required to give you your information in a
“Read-only” format or any other useable format.
The courts have all ruled in favor of the
software companies. Their only obligation is to
“give” you your data, usually as a raw data
dump which meets their legal requirements but
is useless to you.

You can try and have a software IT expert try
and extract your data before you cancel your
contract, but be prepared to shell out
thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for
this service.

The other option is to print out every possible
report from the system and print all patient
information, these can be printed to searchable
PDF files so you can do some limited queries
but this will be labor intensive.

Basically, it is spite on behalf of the EMR
company and is legal.

I warn all of my clients of the dangers of
going cloud based that you can be put in this
position. I also tell clients BEFORE signing
your software agreement, have it reviewed by an
IT expert and/or legal counsel so you know
exactly what your rights are and what to expect
in terms of having your data returned and in
what format.

Unscrupulous EMR companies need to be outed, so
I would encourage you to let everyone know who
they are so they can make more informed
decisions before doing business with them.
Finally, if there are others in the same
situation as yourself, with this same EMR
company, I would suggest that all of you get
together and pool your resources and hire an IT
company to develop a data map and extraction
program. The cost per individual will be much
less than doing it solo. You will soon see that
data extraction will soon be a new cottage
industry, as the consequences of losing one’s
data are great.

Raymond F. Posa, MBA, Farmingdale, NJ

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