Two Oklahoma City Radiologists File Suit to Stop Meaningful Use

Radiologists Ernest Mckenzie, MD, and John Hamlin, MD, are suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Novitas Solutions, in Federal Court over the penalties that will be applied to physicians for not meeting electronic health record meaningful use requirements starting in 2015, reports Courthouse News.According to the radiologist’s suit, the meaningful use penalties for noncompliance place unreasonable and illegal demands on radiologists because radiologists do not typically gather the type of patient history and physical data that meaningful use requirements call for. The law "makes no differentiation in its meaningful use rules and regulations between hospital-based radiologists who only interpret inpatient and outpatient imaging studies without doing histories and physicals on patients and hospital- based radiologists who are interventionalists who interact with patients similar to surgeons and cardiologists where histories and physicals are necessary prior to intervention," the plaintiffs say in the lawsuit. According to Courthouse News, Mckenzie and Hamlin were seeking a court order either declaring that requiring such radiologists to submit meaningful use data is unconstitutional or requiring the government to compensate radiologists for the time and effort that would be necessary to gather the patient history and physical examination data called for under meaningful use requirements. At the time this article was posted, calls to Mckenzie and Hamlin for confirmation and comment had not been returned.