Halamka issues warning for future MU requirements

In his latest blog post, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka, MD, MS, discusses the strong possibility that many hospitals will not meet Meaningful Use Stage 2 attestation deadlines.

“Now that we have experience with two stages of Meaningful Use, it's also clear that a three year cycle is needed to ensure safe, high value, well adopted, introduction of new IT functionality,” he writes in Life as a Healthcare CIO.

Part of the problem, he says, is that “certification criteria are overly burdensome and in many circumstances disconnected from the attestation criteria, requiring very prescriptive features that go beyond the intent” of the policy and standards committees.

Halamka calls for maintaining attestation as a demonstration of performance, but limit certification to rigorous standards adoption and interoperability, not prescriptive functionality. The Meaningful Use Workgroup believes decision support should be expanded in the future, and he agrees with that. However, he says their current recommendations tell vendors how to enhance clinical decision support features.

Requirements that are too prescriptive would stifle innovation, he says. “If certification required rigorous demonstration of outbound and inbound interoperability with no optionality in the standards (use this standard OR that standard), Congress will be happy, patients will be happy, and vendors will be happy. Let's all focus on universal adoption of enhanced interoperability as a measure of success.”

Read Halamka's blog for more.