EHR work continues on all fronts

Another busy, informative, exhausting Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual convention has come and gone. Of course, EMR/EHR use, challenges, successes and more were debated, discussed and deconstructed by a host of speakers.

National Coordinator of Health IT, Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, acknowledged that Meaningful Use is not easy, and meaningful users are earning their incentive pay. Looking ahead to penalties for not meeting Meaningful Use, he said “my goal is for nobody to be penalized. We want everybody to succeed on this.”

Regarding the challenges facing the efforts to transform healthcare, he said, “A lot of what seems to be resistance that is just uncertainty.” Mostashari cited successes, such as the fact that more than 130,000 providers have registered with a regional extension center and 101,000 providers have gone live on an EHR. In addition, more than one-quarter of providers have demonstrated Meaningful Use. Despite the successes to date regarding adoption of health IT, only 24 percent of hospitals are exchanging clinical summaries with outside hospitals. We can and will do better, was his message.

During another session, Nicole Martinez, BSN, RN, director of nursing informatics at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, in New Brunswick, N.J., explained the importance of nurses in the organization's EMR implementation. Physician leadership formally abdicated executive power decisions to a nursing end user group. “The physicians supported the nursing staff so much they said ‘whatever works for you is more important than what works for me.’ They realized that if the ICU nurses can’t practice, document and look at information in a way that supports their practice, it’s only going to hurt them.” That thinking created a very different environment in the ICU, she said. “For physicians to truly collaborate with nursing, the nurses now cared about the physician struggle. It’s a two-way street.”

More recently, I spoke with Leland Babitch, MD, MBA, former CMIO of Detroit Medical Center (DMC), about his frustrating experience being audited for the EHR Incentive program. The auditors wanted more detail than Babitch expected and they didn’t follow the letter of the information provided by the government for its own program. Learn from his experience and update your processes before you get that letter in the mail.

Did you find HIMSS13 an informative and valuable meeting? Are you prepared for the possibility of an EHR Incentive Program audit? Please share your experience.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor