Regional extension centers are gearing up fast to help healthcare providers quickly get up to speed on the newly released final rule on meaningful use.
The Office of the National Coordinator has funded 60 centers nationwide, so far. Their role is to help providers implement electronic health records and achieve meaningful use. ONC began funding the centers in February, but their work has been hampered by the lack of a definitive document on what constitutes meaningful use.
That situation changed Tuesday with the publication of the final rules for both meaningful use and EHR certification criteria. The centers now must work to get the word out to their constituencies.
Tom Silvious, director, Civil & Health Services Group at integrator CSC, said they have wasted no time in doing so.
"In fact they already are pretty heavily engaged," said Silvious, who has worked with regional extension centers in New York State. "They are scheduling webinars and various forms of outreach already to help people understand it, especially since so much has changed in the final rule compared to the proposed rule."
Dan Paoletti, interim chief executive officer of the Ohio Health Information Partnership (OHIP), said the Columbus, Ohio-based center plans to aggregate meaningful use resources such as bulletins and webinars, and distribute those through OHIP to its regional partners and providers.
OHIP works through seven regional partners who support providers within their localities.
Paoletti said he plans to tap state hospital associations and medical societies for meaningful use information, which will be made available through the OHIP Web site (http://www.ohiponline.org/default.aspx). In some cases, OHIP will direct users to other Web sites where they can sign up for webinars or other information on meaningful use.
Ongoing education will prove important since providers will need to report quality indicators they haven't dealt with in the past, he said.
"There is going to be a steep learning curve," he said.
The Altarum Institute, which operates a Michigan regional extension center called M-CEITA, plans to provide a Web-based meaningful use resource center (http://www.MUresource.org), according to an Altarum spokesman. The site is expected to launch later this month, he added.
Vermont Information Technology Leaders (VITL) (http://www.vitl.net), the not-for-profit organization that operates the state's regional extension center, plans to conduct a meaningful use webinar in early August, noted Steve Larose, VITL's vice president of external affairs.
And the California Health Information Parternership and Services Organization (CalHIPSO)(http://www.calhipso.org), a regional extension center based in Oakland, expects to release a meaningful use summary for physicians next week. The center will also host a series of webinars for physicians, said Speranza Avram, CalHIPSO's executive director. Those sessions are also salted to begin next week.
