Provision of Electronic Health Record (EHR) Navigators during Hospital and Critical Access Hospital (CAH) Surveys

Surveying Hospitals & CAHs with EHRs: EHRs are increasingly common in hospitals and CAHs and pose new challenges to the survey process. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) wishes to advise hospitals and CAHs that State Survey Agency (SA) surveyors may be requesting that experienced hospital/CAH EHR users with appropriate system permissions be assigned as “navigators” to assist surveyors with medical record information retrieval for survey tasks requiring detailed medical record review. Providing such assistance is analogous to the traditional expectation for paper-based records that hospitals and CAHs retrieve closed paper medical records requested by surveyors, and hospitals/CAHs are expected to provide the necessary assistance to enable surveyors to review EHRs.