It’s hard to believe that 9 months ago the term meaningful use wasn’t in our everyday vocabulary. Now it is top of mind and a topic of nearly every health IT strategy meeting. While a final definition isn’t now expected until Q2 2010, for sure it will include reporting quality measures and being able to share information among clinics, hospitals and government health agencies. The direction of providing health information to best inform decisions at the point of care and thus improve outcomes is clear, it’s just the pace of the shift that’s in question.

Looking past the carrots and sticks of EMR adoption, experts agree that the focus today should be getting physicians and clinicians to use better information for clinician decision-making. While we lack a formal definition of meaningful use, hospitals, clinics and physician offices need to do their due diligence now to choose a system that best meets their needs to implement necessary changes to improve patient care—the ultimate reason of any change.

In this issue, there’s a lot of meaningful discussion on meaningful use, starting with the story on this topic which begins on page 14. Dr. William Bria’s column on page 32 calls out the importance of clinical decision support systems as a means to provide results and thus facilitate meaningful use. But every topic in between is interwoven with meaningful use. Health information exchanges are at last thriving, providing links to share pertinent patient data locally. They also are defying the odds to both harmoniously align otherwise aggressive competitors and maintain economic autonomy that foiled previous attempts at interoperable networks. Information infrastructure is the foundation of clinical applications to leverage future economic incentives. Mobile computing and wireless networks are the new stethoscopes of point-of-care clinical documentation and decision-making. And interoperability of information systems and similarly, image-enabled EMRs, further push the goals. At the core is consensus building and gaining physician mindshare.

To pay for meaningful use, a $694 million program starts next year, with $598 million being allotted for regional centers’ two-year startup period. For 2011 and 2012, the budget shrinks to $45 million. A National Health Information Technology Research Center that will function as a resource center for the program will receive $50 million.

When we level the field of information access we can further differentiate on how we use the information. Leaders will emerge that provide better, more fair and cost-effective care.

Pushing forward on this path, someday soon we’ll change healthcare’s reputation as the well-known laggard in information technology, sitting a decade or more behind corporate America. Healthcare IT will be mainstream. Someday.