The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), in conjunction with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, must address the issue of inconsistent timelines for the meaningful use Stage 2 regulatory process, wrote healthcare nonprofit eHealth Initiative in its comments to the ONCs Health IT Policy Committee regarding Stage 2 meaningful use objectives.

Baber Ghauri, MD, MBA, has joined St. Mary Medical Center as CMIO, a newly created position to help standardize processes of evidence-based quality care, the Langhorne, Pa., hospital announced. In this role, Ghauri will help develop and implement computerized provider order entry (CPOE) at St. Mary as part of a system-wide effort to support meaningful use of EHRs.

A pair of organizations representing medical groups and informaticists have issued formal comments to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) regarding the proposed Stage 2 objectives for meaningful use.

Confusion over meaningful use may have crimped EMR sales, but the market for EMR hit $15.7 billion in 2010, according to a recent report from market researcher Kalorama Information.

Robust advancement of meaningful use criteria is essential both to ensure a return on investment for taxpayers who are funding the incentives and to lay a firm foundation for meeting the broad goals of health care reform, wrote 25 consumer groups in a collective comment filed last week that that commend many components of the proposed meaningful use Stage 2 criteria included in the Health IT (HIT) Policy Committees Request for Comments.

Drummond Group, an Office of the National Coordinator Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB), has unveiled the EHR Certification Roadmap for Hospitals, a certification program for hospitals that use EHR systems developed in-house or or use systems comprised of various technologies from multiple vendors.

Regarding privacy and security of a patients health record, individuals should have the right to restrict certain services from disclosure, stated the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) in its comments on Stage 2 draft recommendations for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) EHR incentive program. 

The sad reality is that after youre through designing, implementing and refining an EMR, youre just beginning to get to the point of data integration. Yet the idea of being able to integrate data from different cases and learn something is one of the key premises of meaningful use Stage 1 and Stage 2.