By EHRA Chair David Bucciferro (Foothold Technology)

Health information technology (IT) holds great promise for contributing to efforts to streamline and improve the efficiency of the highly complex prior authorization process, and the EHR Association is confident that electronic health record (EHR) systems have a vital role to play in doing so. However, the adoption of electronic prior authorization (ePA) is not without its challenges – challenges that will require time, significant cross-stakeholder coordination, and standardization of access to and exchange of related data to overcome.

As we laid out in the previous three blogs in this series, the EHR Association supports streamlining the ePA process, provided the effort is appropriately supported by accepted standards and care is taken to avoid past mistakes of rolling out policy requirements faster than standards have been developed to support the work.