Meaningful Use

Stage 2 of meaningful use requires at least 5 percent of a given provider's patients to be engaged in their own care either through an online portal or an electronic personal health record. The threshold seems low, but it is the first time that achieving meaningful use is dependent on patient behavior.

Too many eligible providers are waiting for their EHR vendors to take their hands and tell them how to navigate the next stage of meaningful use.

When you picture the first handful of providers able to successfully attest to the rigors of Stage 2 meaningful use, a place like tiny Cottage Hospital might not be the first that leaps to mind.

Thousands of eligible providers are working diligently toward EHR incentive payments, but some practices are choosing a different route: abandoning meaningful use altogether in favor of their own solutions, and finding ways to make up for the penalties they'll incur down the road.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported a new batch of meaningful use attestation numbers on Wednesday, showing a modest improvement over the disappointing rates that were reported in July.

“We will not be attesting to meaningful use Stage 2 in 2014,” Marc Probst, chief information officer of Intermountain, told Healthcare IT News. “And frankly, most of my peers are not as well.”

One of the largest electronic medical record companies recently announced it had inked an agreement to acquire Siemens' health IT business unit, Siemens Health Services, for $1.3 billion in cash.

For the moment, at least, it seems Stage 2 meaningful use is just too difficult for most hospitals and practices to manage. With attestation numbers disappointingly low through the first half of 2014, can we expect to see an appreciable uptick in success stories by the end of the year? One observer's opinion: "probably not."

The EHR vendor market landscape may be poised for a shakeup, as according to recent reports, Cerner may be exploring the possibility of acquiring the health IT division of Siemens Healthcare, which was among the EHR vendors that failed to increase marketshare in 2013.

Doug Fridsma, MD, Ph.D, of the ONC discusses interoperability challenges, standards, and policies at HIMSS14.