Public health experts last week lobbied for including more public health goals into the "meaningful use" incentive plan, including ways to make it easier for public health minders to measure population health trends in chronic and virus-borne diseases.
One idea floated during the July 29 meeting of Health IT Policy Committee's meaningful use work group was to have certified electronic health record systems carry a feature or "button" that would transmit data to state public health agencies to make case reporting easier for physicians and hospitals.
In the recently released final rule on meaningful use, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services required that healthcare providers use their EHRs to complete one public health objective from a list of options:
Physicians and hospitals must be capable of either submitting electronic data to state immunization registries or providing electronic syndromic surveillance data to public health agencies via their EHRs. Hospitals have the third option of reporting lab results electronically to public health agencies.
Although the meaningful use rule does not specify standards for exchanging data that are specifically geared for public health data sharing, committee members discussed pursuing the goal.
Dr. Paul Tang, the panel's chairman and chief medical information officer of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, told the workgroup that the Health IT Standards Committee could potentially take on the task "to come up with standards of interoperability for the public health sector."
Dr. Peter Briss, chief of the community guide branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the panel that prevention is "inadequately represented in current meaningful use efforts."
Meaningful use objectives need to incorporate actions that will affect leading causes of illness and death, he told the workgroup. It is important that meaningful use "extends beyond the walls of the healthcare system," he said.
"Over time, additional population health functionalities need to be added," he said, including the ability of public health systems to exchange data for improved population health assessment and emergency response.
