Meaningful Use
Ed Ricks, VP, Information Services and CIO at Beaufort Memorial Hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, talks about meaningful use security risk analysis.
Weill Cornell's Keith Hentel, MD, will be the first to tell you: His radiology department intentionally failed to meet Stage 1 of meaningful use. They could have done it. But it would have meant pouring already limited resources into something that "doesn't really move our practice anywhere in the right direction," he said.
Offering a bit of leeway, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has pushed out the deadline for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals to attest to meaningful use for the 2014 reporting year, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 31.
A report from the Office of Inspector General outlines the top challenges faced by the Department of Health and Human Services in FY 2014. Among them: meaningful use and interoperability. OIG also highlighted several area HHS continues to struggle with heading into 2015, including electronic health records.
Electronic health records have seen encouraging uptake among office-based physicians in recent years, with eight in 10 now having at least a basic EHR in place. But what do these doctors really think about how health IT works at the point of care? Their frank opinions may surprise you.
With just 2 percent of physicians having managed to attest to Stage 2 meaningful use, clearly something is holding back the vast majority of docs from succeeding in the program. The American Medical Association says they should not be penalized.
A fresh batch of disheartening Stage 2 attestation numbers has prompted several industry groups to once again implore the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to shorten the meaningful use reporting period in 2015 and offer more leeway on some of its more problematic measures.
The past few years have been "a very, very intense time" for health IT workers, said Jim Turnbull, chief information officer at University of Utah Health Care, speaking at the CHIME Fall CIO Forum this past week. As he and other CIOs look ahead toward the next few years, they see more challenges still to come.
The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, better known by its acronym CCHIT, is ending all operations, and expects to conclude the process by later this month. The closure follows an announcement earlier this year that it would stop EHR certifications and focus on advisory services.
MedStar Health, the largest healthcare provider in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region, and Cerner have signed a seven-year agreement to streamline operations, help improve the quality of patient care and develop technologies that align with MedStar's vision.