Integration tools' place in meaningful use
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| Mary Stevens, Editor |
The final requirements for Stage 1 core measures include the tasks deemed essential to creating any medical record, including the entry of basic data: patients’ vital signs and demographics, active medications and allergies, up-to-date problem lists of current and active diagnoses and smoking status. The inclusion of emergency department patients in all of the hospital measures will only make device integration that much more crucial.
In addition, to qualify for incentive payments, clinicians must start employing clinical decision support tools—and by association, the technologies that enable CDS. In a given organization, these tools to facilitate meaningful use might include those that integrate information from the point of care into the EHR; systems that use semantics to identify and aggregate relevant data for quality measure reporting; and accurate messaging capabilities that allow for better patient monitoring.
It won’t be enough for hospitals to implement new clinical systems that work well but can’t communicate with others. Likewise, a functional EMR won’t set one facility apart from another if more facilities deploy them, nor will a subscription to an HIE if useful data are not exchanged.
As executives, ONC officials, professional societies and CMIOs offered their takes on the final rule, there are wide areas of uncertainty and many aspects of this new framework will bear watching during the coming years. However, facilities that have the means to aggregate, exchange and report information, both within their organization and beyond the walls, could find themselves a little closer to becoming meaningful users than their less-integrated counterparts.
Meaningful use took center stage in the world of health IT, understandably, but there also were important ancillary moves during the past month that may ultimately bolster the initiative’s chances of reaching critical mass. The HIT Standards Committee released exchange privacy policies and outlined interoperability initiatives for the Nationwide Health Information Network.
Studies elsewhere have reported that Wifi adoption in healthcare jumped 60 percent in one year, and smartphones are gaining acceptance in this arena as well. Although these developments might not be directly related to interoperability—yet—organizations will at some point need to consider their ramifications for security and integrated data requirements.
For now, though, many organizations are trying to figure out what they will have to do to attain meaningful interoperability.
Mary Stevens, Editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com