Meaningful Use
The upfront investment, development charges and personnel costs associated with traditional electronic health record (EHR) implementations make clear that getting to Stage 1 Meaningful Use is only the beginning of the investment. Additional enhancements required for Stage 2, changes in the regulatory environment, even minor code fixes - all will dramatically increase the overall cost of an already expensive proprietary EHR system.
Healthcare professionals who had signed an agreement to receive technical assistance from a Regional Extension Center were more than twice as likely to have been awarded an incentive payment for achieving meaningful use, according to a new GAO report, that slices and dices who received how much, when and where.
The catalog of meaningful tasks - from clinical decision support and care coordination, to quality and safety, patient engagement, and population health - promises to go a long way toward improving care, and the requirements are also apt to stretch hospitals and physicians as they work to achieve Stage 3 meaningful use.
Reavis Eubanks, MD, defies the odds when it comes to giving up his paper charts and adopting an electronic medical record system. First, solo doctors, by many accounts, have a tough time making the transition; there's no IT personnel on staff to guide them and to troubleshoot, and then there's the issue of cost.
Christopher Boone, director of outpatient quality and health IT for the American Heart Association in Dallas, will fill a vacancy on the federal Health Information Technology Policy Committee. Boone will fill one of three committee positions held by advocates for patients or consumers.
Former President Bill Clinton will deliver the keynote at HIMSS13 in New Orleans on March 6. HIMSS officials released its list of speakers on Sept. 5, the same day Clinton delivered the keynote at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.
Look up the term "bioinformatics" and the definition will most likely be a convoluted series of references to algorithms, databases, artificial intelligence, computation theory, discrete mathematics, signal processing, statistics and a half-dozen other terms for complicated concepts. In essence, it is difficult to explain because there are so many facets to it.
Two years ago this summer, the meaningful use Stage 1 final rule was revealed to an eager public. Immediately, hospitals and physician practices got down to business. Since then, core measures have been tackled and menus sets have been ticked off lists. Some criteria were relatively doable, some have remained maddeningly problematic, but more than $2.5 billion in checks have been mailed out so far.
David Blumenthal, MD, who was the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology from 2009 to 2011, has been appointed president of the Commonwealth Fund. He will succeed Karen Davis, effective Jan. 1, 2013.
Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the substance of the Affordable Care Act, it's time to refocus attention toward the essentially bipartisan support for health IT. At the same time, it's worth reconsidering some closely-held beliefs about technology's role in care delivery.