The U.S. Office of Inspector General might not be the source of routine rules of the road for information blocking for electronic health records (EHRs), but the agency is tasked with some of the enforcement load. OIG just announced that $1 million fines for violations of information blocking rules will go into force in late August, a penalty that can accrue astonishingly quickly as it may apply per violation rather than per a series of related violations.

The European Commission (EC) has proposed new legislation directed toward formation of a European Health Data Space (EHDS), which is nominally intended to address some perceived gaps in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While this legislative proposal seems to interact with both the GDPR and pending EU legislation on artificial intelligence, the EHDS takes on the massive challenge of compulsory interoperability of electronic health records (EHRs). The EC unveiled the proposal with an emphasis on health data accessibility, although both the European Council and the European Parliament will now have their say over how the legislation will ultimately read.

There has been some skepticism about the value of electronic health records (EHRs) beyond their role as a source of income for EHR developers, but an April 3 presentation at the 2022 America College of Cardiology scientific sessions being held in Washington suggests this type of software offers some real value for heart failure patients. Tariq Ahmad of Yale School of Medicine said a study of EHRs suggests their power lay in part in prompting compliance with heart failure medication regimes, an application of this type of software that can both save lives and cut costs for the Medicare program and Medicare beneficiaries.

Google Health is expanding the reach of its Care Studio technology to clinical software company Medical Information Technology Inc. (Meditech). The companies reported a partnership at HIMSS 2022 to integrate search functionalities from the Google product suite within Westwood, Mass.-based Meditech's web-based Expanse electronic health record (EHR). The aim is to combine data from different sources into a standard format and offer clinicians a full ‘holistic’ view of patient records.

LONDON – Health data specialist Sensyne Health plc is opening up broader access to its U.S./U.K. patient information system with the launch of a subscription service giving accredited users the ability to interrogate more than 2 million longitudinal electronic health records. At an annual cost of £25,000 (US$34,602) per head, the company will provide “industrial scale” access to anonymized hospital records “to the smallest company or to a single researcher working in academe,” through the new Sensight service, said Paul Drayson, CEO.

The use of voice recognition systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) in health care is emerging in India, which offers a potentially enormous market, according to Scribetech Healthcare (India) Pvt. Ltd., one of the leading voice recognition companies in the country.

With the advent of wearable digital health technologies, patient-generated health data (PGHD) will play an increasingly central role in evidence generation for medical device companies. Speakers on a recent FDA workshop advised that there are several barriers to the use of PGHD for evidence generation, however, such as the perennial headache of data interoperability and a new twist on the question of patient trust, problems that are likely to plague the field for the foreseeable future.

Withings Health Solutions, the business-to-business division of the connected health company Withings SA, is launching two cellular-connected devices that allow patients to measure their weight and blood pressure at home and immediately transmit the results to a health care provider. The products – the Body Pro smart scale and the BPM Connect Pro at-home blood pressure monitor(BPM) – are being marketed directly to health professionals, as well as researchers and chronic disease management companies, for distribution to patients to use at home.