Federal Government Incentivizes Electronic Health Records that Make Health Care Fraud Easier, USA Today Reports

USA Today reports that the incentives being provided by the federal government to get doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records are being offered even though those EHRs "currently make it easier for health care providers to defraud government-paid health programs." The issue, according to USA Today, is that the EHRs don't have auditing safeguards in place to prevent fraud or the safeguards are "vulnerable to corruption" from providers adding unnecessary notes to existing records or creating new records where none existed before.

 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has spent $22.5 billion in financial incentives for healthcare providers to use EHRs, USA Today also reports.