March 27, 2015 — American College of Cardiology (ACC) President Kim Allan Williams Sr., M.D., FACC, issued the following statement in response to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on “America’s Health IT Transformation: Translating the Promise of Electronic Health Records into Better Care":
“Today’s Senate HELP committee hearing on electronic health records (EHRs) offered vital insights into the importance of improving EHRs so they may provide clinicians and patients necessary access to data as we move toward team-based care. For EHRs to truly achieve their promise, clinicians must have the ability to share and exchange data with other clinicians, patients and colleagues. This information, once de-identified, must also be accessible to other data users, such as clinical data registries like those operated by the ACC, which set benchmarks for quality use and care and create guidelines to improve patient outcomes. Unfortunately, some EHR vendors actively prevent the sharing of information through costly or burdensome technical interfaces. The ACC urges Congress to take steps to eliminate data blocking and to take steps to enable a more open exchange of data so that clinicians can work toward their most important goal: improving patient outcomes.”
For more information: www.acc.org
August 13, 2019 
