Meaningful Use

I've blogged a couple of times about medical scribes in the last couple of months in a tone more disapproving than not. I recently read a testimonial of a senior in college, who is planning to take his medical school admissions test next year.

One of the major goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is to stimulate the economy by creating jobs. The HITECH Act has certainly done its part and is the most visible part of ARRA that is creating jobs because of the federal incentives for adopting EHRs.

There can be no meaningful use of an EHR without product certification. To make the testing go without a hitch, practice, practice and practice some more, officials from the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) urged CIOs gathered at the CHIME10 Fall CIO Forum.

CIOs who are keeping a close watch on the Health Information Exchange (HIE) and Regional Extension Center (REC) efforts in their states are worried the country might be building a Tower of Babel, as Catherine M. Szenczy, senior vice president and CIO of MedStar Health in Columbia, Md., put it.

The nation's healthcare IT chief, David Blumenthal, MD, acknowledged that achieving meaningful use of health IT would be hard work, and then told his audience of more than 600 health system and hospital CIOs and IT managers there would be even harder work ahead.

Physician groups in rural parts of the country have greater challenges in adopting EHRs. The regional extension centers (RECs) are a new resource for them, but RECs serving rural areas, not surprisingly, also have challenges.

Regional extension centers (RECs) are just beginning their work to help priority primary care physicians adopt EHRs. Many of them, however, have developed sustainability plans to take them beyond years three and four of the meaningful use criteria milestones.

Steven Waldren, MD, director of the Center for Health Information Technology for the American Academy of Family Physicians, has helped many small physician practices implement and adopt EHRs.

While the Regional Extension Center program was designed to assist priority primary care providers in small practices, hospitals and public health clinics, some industry groups worry that rural communities and communities of color will still be left behind the digital transformation.

A Sept. 25th editorial in the Des Moines Register called for the phase-out of the Veterans Affairs' healthcare system. The response in a guest column has given more ammunition, no pun intended, to the side in favor of specialized veterans care.