Jeff Rowe

Imagine it's 2020. You had a test done the day before, a test that was ordered because your physician was alerted via your EHR to a gap in care. The following morning, both you and your physician receive the results via e-mail, you via your PHR and she via her EHR system.

I don't believe anyone in the healthcare industry believes ARRA will single-handedly drive up EHR adoption among providers. Of course, the hope is that the federal incentive money will bring physicians, for whom cost is an issue, into the fold. But what's going to really move the needle on EHR adoption?

The Meaningful Use Notice of Proposed Rulemaking included clinical decision support rules as one of the objectives providers must implement. More emphasis on using CDS capabilities from EHRs and EMRs is something that Robert Murphy, MD, chief medical informatics officer at Memorial Hermann Healthcare System in Houston is excited about and applauds.

When it comes to advancing health IT, New York State and New York City really put their money where their mouths are. The latest endeavor by the City is a Panel Management Program, which is administered by the New York City Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene's Primary Care Information Project (PCIP).

Emma Schwartz wrote a very compelling article in the Huffington Post Investigative Fund about physician groups whose purchases of EMRs from unstable companies resulted in faulty products that never delivered. The EMR companies she profiled went bankrupt, leaving their physician-group clients high and dry.

Physician adoption of EHRs has been rising, according to surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Commonwealth Fund and Kalorama Information. What's driving the trend is not necessarily the promise of ARRA bonuses.

It was reported on Jan. 26 that the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, better known as HITSP, will close shop when its contract expires Jan. 31, but John Halamka, MD, said a contract extension will keep HITSP operational until ONC awards work for the next evolution of standards development.

For the most part, the American Academy of Family Physicians, an advocate for health IT, supports the meaningful use criteria that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released at the end of last year. They have an issue, however, with the reporting requirements of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

The Dept. of Health and Human Services published its Interim Final Rule, "Health Information Technology: Initial Set of Standards, Implementation Specifications and Certification Criteria for Electronic Health Record Technology," which includes certification criteria for EHRs, in the Federal Register Jan. 13. Now that the standards rules for certification have been updated to align with the meaningful use criteria, when will the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) create a process to recognize certification bodies, which is required by law?

Last week's meeting of the HIT Policy Committee reportedly included extensive discussions concerning the future of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).