The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) should “completely reconceptualize” the Meaningful Use (MU) program, say Peter Basch, MD, FACP, medical director for ambulatory EHR and health IT policy for MedStar Health, and Thomson Kuhn, senior systems architect at the American College of Physicians, writing on the Health Affairs blog.

“A new MU program should focus on specialty-specific measures of quality and be based in normal clinical work patterns, rather than rewarding clinicians for meeting artificial ‘one size fits none’ threshold requirements for specific functional uses of EHRs and health IT.”

The Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) “offers a window for rethinking MU.”

Basch and Kuhn call for an end to MU no later than 2018 and say “a very different and more appropriate MU program should emerge in 2019 for those clinicians participating in the MIPS program. Our recommendation is thus not a delay in finalizing Stage 3, but rather a transition from Stage 2 to implementation of MIPS in 2019, with a more appropriate and integrated MU component.”

CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) should set a new tone by collaborating with physicians and other clinicians to determine the key tasks that clinicians and staff will need to perform to improve care, they write. This would help clinicians be better prepared for the future of healthcare delivery.

They offer the following seven recommendations:

1. Eliminate all EHR-functional-use measure thresholds
2. Judiciously continue EHR-functional-use measurement reporting (without thresholds) to learn more about health IT-enabled care and improve EHR usability
3. Demonstrate continuing education within the domains of Health IT
4. Advance meaningful and practical interoperability
5. Support bi-directional and less burdensome reporting to public health
6. Develop and use flexible measures of patient engagement that respect patient and family needs and preferences
7. Encourage clinician engagement and innovation by allowing for new types of activities to replace existing measures

Read the entire blog post.