It looks like they fined officers of the company, as well as a developer and 2 PMs. Is this standard practice for False Claims Act suits? How much should I worry about this as a developer?
IANAL and I can't find the court documents, but probably not much. Not unless you are offering up solutions to intentionally bypass the requirements.
Having worked at an EHR, PMs routinely instructed us to build things specifically. I could suggest cosmetic stuff, but couldn't really suggest changes to the underlying business logic of the requirements because it had usually been hammered out by PMs/Nurses/Doctors/Maybe-legal. These requirements formed the basis of test cases for QA to run though.
ECW was not the vendor I worked for, so it's possible the developer had more influence over business logic or its implementation.
These things sound like time or cost-cutting measures:
>opted to added the 16 drug codes necessary for certification into its software rather than enable the product to access those from a complete database
Sounds like they didn't buy the database.
>eClinicalWorks did not satisfy data portability requirements designed to enable doctors to transfer patient data to over vendor’s EHRs
This sounds like they didn't want to build something to export to CCDA?
These sound like negligence / not enough testing:
>failed to accurately record user actions with audit log functionality
>did not always accurately record diagnostic imaging orders or conduct drug-drug interaction checks
For drug-drug interaction, that is probably another drug database to purchase, so it's possible they simply hadn't bought it. Building your own is obviously out of the question.
Yeah DDI check are tricky, and you basically have to buy a solution.
As for the CCDA piece, that's interesting. It should be pretty easy to build that, it's a pretty simple standard and I think there are C# and Java libs that basically just do it.
Yeah, the veterinary part is pretty stupid. Do you know the history behind that? Is it related to using the standard for research?
The DSTU2 json representation isn't bad(for the healthcare), and it's easier to work with than a lot of the adhoc in house apis I've seen. Though, Athen's api is nice. I do wish that FHIR did something like the CCDA, it's convenient to be able to consume health history in 1 shot.
> How much should I worry about this as a developer?
It's hard to say without understanding the basis for the claims against the developers, which are separate from the case against the company and its officers. I can find both the complaints and settlement agreement for the action against the company [0], but not those against the developers.
I would say not much. Meaningful Use is/was a unique program. In this case it seems like there was a conspiracy to deliberately cheat the certification only implementing the 16 drug checks that the examiner was going to check.
The end result was CMS paying out large bonuses to health systems using the eCW software when they really shouldn't have.
> In this case it seems like there was a conspiracy to deliberately cheat the certification only implementing the 16 drug checks that the examiner was going to check.
There's a lot more than the drug code hardcoding in this case.
