Meaningful Use
Now that we have experience with two stages of meaningful use, it's also clear that a three year cycle is needed to ensure safe, high value, well adopted, introduction of new IT functionality.
It's a hard knock life being a CIO in the healthcare sector. Federal regulations have shifted IT teams' priorities away from their typical laundry list of day-to-day tasks. But, as responsibilities pile up and overtime hours accumulate, this year as Thanksgiving nears, even CIOs have something to be grateful for.
Wish there could be a delay of Stage 2 meaningful use? Talk to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, not the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. And don't hold your breath.
If more office-based docs got on board with health information technology solutions, they'd be able to see more patients while also lightening their overall workload, according to the findings of a new Johns Hopkins study.
David Levin, MD, CMIO at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, discusses the challenges with meaningful use, data exchanges and the lack of "human factor" in health IT.
With mHealth becoming the norm instead of the exception, a panel at Partners HealthCare's 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium concluded that EHR vendors will have to find a way to modify their products to focus on data that the patient and his or her care team want, or they'll become obsolete.
After nearly 20 years as a CIO, I've learned that even with the best people, best planning and appropriate budgets, large, complex projects encounter issues imposed by external factors that cannot be predicted during initial project scheduling.
The 16-day government shutdown that ended Oct. 17 brought the work of the Office of the National Coordinator to a screeching halt, with cancelled meetings of high-level federal advisory committees and workgroups. But with the end of the shutdown, all hands are on deck and ready to work, according to ONC officials.
Best practices are all well and good, but sometimes it's instructive to take a look at worst practices -- the mistakes everyone should be sure to avoid. When it comes to meaningful use audits, there's simply too much at stake.
Though he no longer has authority over meaningful use regulations, former ONC chief Farzad Mostashari, MD, said that due to the nature of the federal regulatory process, it would be difficult to introduce more flexibility for complying with the Stage 2 rules.