Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Meaningful Use has Arrived

After months of anticipation, the definition of Meaningful Use has arrived.

Today at the meeting of the HIT Policy Committee, the Workgroup on Meaningful Use presented its work, as a preamble and a matrix.

The meaningful use matrix is organized into specific meaningful use goals to be achieved by 2011, 2013, and 2015. It also lists metrics for these goals to evaluate hospital and clinician progress in meeting them.

Over the past 60 days, HITSP Tiger Teams have been hard at work simplifying the HITSP Interoperability Specifications by creating a small set of services which we call Capabilities. You'll see that these capabilities support all the data exchanges needed for meaningful use, including clinical operations (lab, rad, eRx, clinical summary), clinical quality (quality/performance measures, public health reporting, biosurveillance, immunization registries), and privacy/security (encryption, authorization, auditing are built into the HITSP capabilities).

If you need an elevator speech about meaningful use, slides 22-32 in the HIT Policy Committee meeting presentation provides a great overview of the criteria supporting five focus areas

Improve Quality, Safety, Efficiency

Engage Patients and Families

Improve Care Coordination

Improve Population and Public Health

Ensure Privacy and Security Protections


Now that the initial definition of meaningful use is available, the HIT Standards Committee workgroups and HITSP will work through the month of July to ensure the matrix is populated with the most up to date standards and implementation guide detail.

Hospitals and Clinician offices now know what is expected for 2011, so the time is now to begin your software implementations.
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11 comments:

  1. Sivereknet.comJune 16, 2009 at 9:43 AM

    thank you

    Siverek

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris HardingJune 16, 2009 at 11:34 AM

    Very informative posting. Thanks for putting this up today.
    Best,
    Chris Harding
    CEO, Concordant

    ReplyDelete
  3. GreenLeavesJune 16, 2009 at 11:56 AM

    The 10 slides sure provide HITSP with some work.
    How much do you feel your group has already antipated vs. newly introduced ones?

    ReplyDelete
  4. TodcastingJune 16, 2009 at 12:27 PM

    Great posting, John - thanks.

    How well do you think the standards will insure true interoperability/portability of data by patients (with full security, of course)?

    ReplyDelete
  5. calaulJune 16, 2009 at 1:03 PM

    Thanks for posting this info John.

    I wonder if the exchange of "meaningful clinical information" has to be done only electronically? I say this because i see references to paper and eFax in the "2011 measures for improving care coordination" .

    Doru Mihaescu

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  6. UnknownJune 17, 2009 at 6:17 AM

    Interoperability is the holy grail and we are far away from that, todays legacy systems will likely never achieve any trutly useful data exchange beyond some discrete sets of data like labs or just textual dumps as entire notes which few recipients will ever read.

    For semantic context and true interoperability we have to look at research applications like openEHR

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  7. Alex IJune 17, 2009 at 7:25 AM

    your blog has helped me tremendously to distill the volumes of information being generated about "Meaningful Use". my concern is primarily centered on the question of "how will the certification and usability process emanating from MU give IT Health Vendors and Hospitals time to adjust, build and install the certified version of their health system?". Jan 2011 is not that far away for them to be eligible for monies. Anyway I read your blog every day. Thanks.

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  8. JohnnysmoothJune 17, 2009 at 7:44 AM

    John,
    As the MU recommendation released yesterday are still "Draft" and based on my own assessment, require a major rework, how will this impact the HITSP timetable? Are there certain aspects of the MU draft, eg privacy and security for which there is not much controversy that HITSP will tackle first while the remaining parts of MU get redefined. Any and all enlightenment is appreciated.

    FYI, did a post yesterday on the MU draft as well: http://chilmarkresearch.com/2009/06/16/meaningful-use-draft-is-tough/

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  9. Dr. Steve BellerJune 17, 2009 at 12:11 PM

    While the HIT Policy Committee is taking a step in the right direction, I contend that it falls short in arguably the most important area, clinical decision support. This is because their definition (a) makes no mention of requiring EHRs to implement crucial “patient centered cognitive support” and (b) it postpones clinical outcomes, efficiency, and safety measures until 2015.

    I discuss this issue at http://curinghealthcare.blogspot.com/2009/06/meaningful-use-clinical-decision.html

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  10. MuffinJune 17, 2009 at 1:53 PM

    No, there should be no implementations yet because we do not yet know which EHRs will be considered certified for the Medicare and Medicaid incentive program. The meaningful use definition for the incentive program will be proposed in late 2009 and finalized in 2010.

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  11. AhierJune 18, 2009 at 10:49 AM

    If you missed the meeting you can see the HIT Policy Meeting Transcripts here, plus the presentation materials.

    ReplyDelete