CHIME urges one-year extension of Stage 2 Meaningful Use
A one year extension of Meaningful Use Stage 2 would maximize its potential for success, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) declared to senators in a May 6 letter.
CHIME’s feedback followed an April 16 white paper from six Republican senators, entitled “REBOOT: Re-examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Health IT,” that highly criticized Meaningful Use and called for a halt to the program to re-examine its strategies. The legislators had requested feedback from stakeholders on their findings.
In its letter, CHIME said an additional year will give providers the opportunity to optimize their EHR technology to achieve the benefits of Stage 1 and Stage 2. Moreover, “it will give vendors the time needed to prepare, develop and deliver needed technology to correspond with Stage 3; and it will give policymakers time to assess and evaluate programmatic trends needed to craft thoughtful Stage 3 rules.”
While CHIME recommended the extension, it said Meaningful Use regulations have enabled positive shifts through widespread health IT adoption. “We remain convinced that the trajectory set by Meaningful Use is the correct one,” according to the letter.
CHIME did acknowledge the senators' concerns on the current state of interoperability in its letter, but said “we strongly believe that EHR incentive payments under the policy of Meaningful Use have been essential in moving the nation’s healthcare system into the 21st Century.”
Additionally, CHIME requested Congress to both seek an update from the Office of the National Coordinator on Health IT on existing methods to prevent patient matching errors and hold a congressional hearing, or other formal commenting mechanism, on that topic. It also asked the legislators to explore how current work at the S&I Framework could be leveraged to resolve patient data-matching issues.
In other comments, CHIME urged for reasonable Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services audits that do not overburden providers.