Draft quality measures, quality reporting timeline released
Clinical quality measures moved to the forefront this month with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), in conjunction with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), releasing draft clinical quality measures on the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s U.S. Health Information Knowledgebase website. The agency also released a timeline for eligible professionals and eligible hospitals detailing quality reporting alignment across eHealth initiative programs.
The draft measures are located at the website’s Meaningful Use portal and are open for public comment. They include “Tobacco Use and Help with Quitting Among Adolescents” and “Hepatitis B Vaccine Coverage Among All Live Newborn Infants Prior to Hospital or Birthing Facility Discharge.”
When authenticated, users can access the complete data of the draft measures and submit comments, which will be reviewed by CMS and ONC.
Even as federal agencies are working on quality measures to improve patient care, other challenges are ongoing.
For example, an overabundance of alerts in the EHR may negatively impact patient health and outcomes, according to a study featured in the June issue of Pediatrics.
The authors examined the case of a 2-year-old patient who experienced complications as a result of an extended series of non–evidence-based alerts in the EHR. “Desensitization to EHR drug alerting by the deluge of overrides” led to the patient receiving inappropriate medication. “Although the patient’s clinical course was complicated by many factors, the inappropriate allergy overrides further confused the situation,” the authors wrote.
And, health IT adoption in medical practices remains problematic for many U.S. physicians, according to a Deloitte Center for Health Solutions survey.
Most physicians feel EHRs improve efficiency—in particular due to faster and more accurate billing and time savings through e-prescribing—and they also feel that non-adopters should be able to overcome cost and operational integration barriers to meet Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 1 requirements.
The survey also revealed that most physicians are slow to adopt online tools and digital health technologies in direct patient care, and do not use mHealth technologies, such as tablets or smartphones, for clinical purposes.
Are you or your organization finding health IT adoption to be a challenge? Please share your experience.
Beth Walsh
Clinical Innovation + Technology editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.