Much debate over MU program

The past month has included much debate about the Meaningful Use program and whether a pause is warranted, and, just this week the CommonWell Alliance finally shared its plans to drive EHR interoperability.

In the first of a series of Senate Finance Committee hearings planned on health IT, witnesses Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, national coordinator for health IT and Patrick Conway, chief medical officer and director, Center for Clinical Standards and Quality and acting director, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, reported on progress of the Meaningful Use (MU) program and advised against temporarily halting it.

The hearing came three months after six Republican senators released a white paper calling for a pause of the program to address interoperability concerns and re-examine current procedures put in place to safeguard and ensure the meaningful use of EHRs prior to forging ahead with Stages 2 and 3.

Mostashari advised against delaying the program, noting that more than 80 percent of eligible hospitals and 50 percent of eligible professionals have adopted EHRs and received incentive payments—with the use of electronic prescriptions and computerized physician order entry spiking.

“A pause in the program would stall the progress that has been hard fought,” he said, saying that there is sufficient movement for Stage 2 to move ahead. “We need to meet the urgency of the moment for the transformation of healthcare. A pause would take the momentum away from the progress.”

Meanwhile, the CommonWell Health Alliance, the vendor group which announced its creation at HIMSS13 in February, shared its interoperability goals and efforts during a webinar presented by the National eHealth Collaborative.

Arien Malec, vice president, strategy, RelayHealth said the alliance is working to enable widespread information exchange among disparate scaled stakeholders and bring healthcare into the 21 ^st century.

Malec said that this week the initial test environment should be up and running, and that testing with its partners will occur through the rest of the year. Results of the pilot will be unveiled at the 2014 HIMSS conference. By the second quarter of next year, the alliance will open up to the second wave of partners, with expected national deployment in the third quarter of 2014.

“Standards are incredibly important, but we also need to get vendors enabling standards and enabling services,” Malec said. “We need to provide linking services so we can enable that link, or power those links, in order to enable the data access."

Responding to the rumors that EHR vendor Epic was not invited to join the alliance, Malec replied: “We can’t get to the world we are getting to with single vendors. We absolutely did invite and meet with key principals at Epic and we continue to invite everybody,” he said, noting that they had met with the top 20 vendors in the EHR industry.

At the present time, the CommonWell Health Alliance is applying for not-for-profit status to form a trade association. “If we intended to keep vendor X or Y out, there is no way legally we could; we’d be violating our not-for-profit status. Anybody who wants in, is in.”

What do you think of the CommonWell Alliance and the Meaningful Use program? Please share your thoughts.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor