Meaningful Use

There has been some buzz lately about how interoperability is a non-issue. I beg to differ. With increasing pressure from federal initiatives like Meaningful Use Stage 2, there is growing need for information exchange across the industry.

More than a third of physician practices plan to purchase, replace or upgrade ambulatory EHR systems, according to HIMSS Analytics' newest Ambulatory Electronic Health Record & Practice Management Study. Meanwhile, nearly half of physician groups say they'll join an HIE.

If you were a healthcare provider and all you did was read press releases, you'd be tempted to think that transitioning to a new EHR involved little more than opening the package and plugging in the contents. Naturally, things are a little more complicated than that.

"Stage 1 is tough but not too tough. Stages 2 and 3 are darn tough," says Laura Kreofsky, principal advisor at Naperville, Ill.-based Impact Advisors. By making Stage 1 so much easier than Stage 2, in some ways, CMS has set a false sense of security for providers.

There are buzz phrases, and then there are buzz phrases. And if there's one phrase that has permeated the healthcare sector more thoroughly than all the others, it's probably "accountable care." But what exactly does it mean? Or, more to the point for healthcare providers, how do you know when you're actually providing it?

"It's systems that let ordinary people do extraordinary things," national coordinator for health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD said during a Health IT Policy Committee meeting talk that vice chair Paul Tang described immediately afterward as "inspiring and challenging."

Responding to a feedback request from Senators on Capitol Hill regarding health IT adoption, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives called for a one-year pushback of the Stage 2 meaningful use deadline and defended the efficacy of the federal incentive program.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) this year implemented pre-payment audits on Medicare and dually eligible -- Medicare and Medicaid -- providers participating in the EHR Incentive Programs. The audit programs target between 5 and 10 percent of eligible professionals attesting for meaningful use, according to Elizabeth Holland, director of the HIT Initiatives Group within CMS' Office of E-Health Standards and Services.

Navigating the waters around meaningful use can be tricky, but there are plenty of tools and techniques at hand to help make the transition a smooth and positive one.

At the annual TEDMED conference on April 16, speakers in the opening session shared stories and innovative ideas on how big data could influence the future of medicine.