A Health & Human Services Department advisory panel Friday explored potential clarifications and tweaks of its proposed meaningful use rules, the set of requirements healthcare providers must meet in order to qualify for thousands of dollars in federal health IT incentive payments.
It its first session on Jan. 8 following the release of the proposal, the meaningful use workgroup of HHS's Health IT Policy Committee signaled it might revisit aspects of the plan, including the number of quality measures it requires and the effect on physicians trying to apply them.
But the panel said it would concentrate on "philosophical" comments instead of specific changes. "Clearly, clinical quality reporting and quality measures tied to outcome improvement is one of those big topics," said Paul Tang, the workgroup co-chairman and chief medical information officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
The panel will share its recommendations with the Health IT Policy Committee, which will then submit its comments on the proposed rule to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT in March.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released on Dec. 30 its proposed criteria for meaningful use, among them the requirement that providers report 25 quality measures in order to qualify for the first round of incentives in 2011.
Work group members said some of the measures are more relevant than others to some physicians and hospitals
Tony Trenkle, director of CMS' Office of e-Health Standards and Services said he anticipated fewer measures in the final version.
"We would certainly try to reduce them as we get the comments back in," he said. "The idea was to report out a suite of specialty measures and then invite comments for that. We are going to be looking at what they say about the measures " their operational readiness and their appropriateness and how they relate to health outcomes."
Workgroup member David Lansky, president and CEO of Pacific Business Group on Health, said that providers should be demonstrating that they are using technology in a way that enables them to drive quality improvement.
"I would want to pick a small number of measures that reflect competencies or functional capabilities and is going to support content used for clinical decision support," he said.
The panel also discussed the need for clarification in the definition of eligible physicians, especially those in practices that are affiliated with a hospital, and the mechanisms to make information available to patients and the extent of care coordination.
The panel will share its initial discussion topics with the full policy ommittee at its next meeting Jan. 13.
