EHRs: The original source of hot topics
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| Beth Walsh, Editor, CMIO |
Scroll down for CMIO’s top picks for HIMSS12 sessions on EHRs and read on for highlights from the most pertinent EHR news.
The beginning of a new year is, of course, an excellent time for thought leaders to reflect on the previous year’s trials and tribulations and look forward to new goals. This year there is no shortage of reviewers and prognosticators. In a Jan. 25 HealthIT Buzz post, Farzad Mostashari, MD, national coordinator for health IT, clued the nation into five health IT trends expected to take off as healthcare reform progresses and predicted that 2012 is the year that health IT “truly comes of age.”
Not surprisingly, EHRs and increasing adoption by providers of EHR systems play a huge role. With more than 20,000 eligible professionals and 1,200 hospitals already receiving payments from the Medicare or Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs, Mostashari noted other good adoption signs such as a survey indicating attainment of meaningful use is a top priority for more than two-thirds of hospital executives and a fivefold increase in e-prescribing by office-based physicians since 2000.
“As more providers adopt EHRs and go through the process of attesting to meaningful use, I believe they will increasingly see the direct connections between health IT, new payment models and the ways in which the former can help them succeed with the latter,” Mostashari wrote.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., formed a health project task force to identify the best practices for healthcare organizations to follow to facilitate coordinated, patient-centered care and to make recommendations for ensuring the optimal use of health IT.
Citing limited EHR adoption as a barrier, the task force’s report includes several recommendations for improving adoption, such as creating a strategy to raise awareness of meaningful use incentives, the federal government making available information on best practices, the public sector executing strategies for sharing literature on best practices and the healthcare community collaborating to identify common problems with EHRs and demanding that vendors address them.
Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggested that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should address the performance of the National Quality Forum (NQF), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization contracted by the HHS to retool existing and develop new quality measures for use in the EHR incentive programs.
The EHR quality measures have taken too long and cost too much: The January GAO report revealed the NQF did not meet deadlines outlined in its contract, it exceeded cost estimates and 44 of its completed retooled measures contained errors.
“Given that NQF is the entity in the U.S. with lead responsibility for endorsing healthcare quality measures, NQF’s endorsement activities under the contract are of key importance to help meet HHS’s quality measurement needs,” concluded the report.
How are you feeling about EHR adoption? Whether you are an early adopter or running behind the pack, I’m sure you will learn a lot at HIMSS12.
Beth Walsh
Editor, CMIO
bwalsh@trimedmedia.com
Beth Walsh,
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.