EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit

The developer loaded the hard-coded data to evade detection and the PM oversaw the process where the data was validated against the government's test harness for Meaningful Use. I suppose you could argue that those people would have pushed back on the lack of ethics in the situation and halted the process to prevent their certification.

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.

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.

> 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.

[0] both the whistleblower and government complaints, and the final settlement I agreement, are linked from this article: https://www.emrandhipaa.com/emr-and-hipaa/2017/05/31/ecw-ecl...

Wow I wonder if jurisdiction shopping might have a positive outcome here (a opposed to e.g. East Texas for patent markman findings).

Do you have any experience with any other EHR software and if so what do you like? Years ago I did installs of Amazing Charts for small offices. And where I initially was optimistic about their growth prospects I was eventually disappointed in their growth after government requirements took effect. At the time eCW and E-MDs were the cool products on the main physician message board and at least one of my former clients eventually migrated. I had thought they were in better hands though perhaps not.