Meaningful use or wishful thinking?

Besides funding, the most sought-after commodity in any healthcare setting is time. The get-it-done-yesterday environment in most facilities has CMIOs scrambling. The aggressive timelines proposed by the interim final rule (IFR) and notice of proposed rule-making (NPRM) for meaningful use will further test health IT professionals. It’s enough to make anyone holler “Wait a minute!” The old adage about taking time now to save it later is a point well-taken, but few people in healthcare have the luxury of a few extra seconds, let alone the ability to wait a full minute. After all, time is money.

At the very least, the timelines announced for implementing the rules for meaningful use and qualified EHRs should be reconsidered, according to the American Hospital Association. Their rationale: Although health IT holds “great promise in improving care, widespread efforts toward adoption will be hindered unless key provisions in these rules are addressed.”

These aggressive interoperability timelines require specific implementation guides and reference implementations, says John D. Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, in his blog summarizing comments from his colleagues concerning the IFR and NPRM for the proposed meaningful use definitions.

“[E]ither the standards need more detail, especially in the transmission area, or the NPRM goals need to be reduced in scope/extended in time,” Halamka said.

A CSC Healthcare Group survey found that many hospitals are only 50 percent compliant with the Department of Health and Human Services’ draft rules for EHRs. Smaller hospitals have lower readiness scores, especially for use of required applications and quality reporting.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s 60-day comment period for the NPRM ends next month, and it will be interesting to see whether deadlines or actual requirements change based on input from practitioners.

Along with the calls for more time, however, there are new reports of health systems making progress toward achieving meaningful use via health IT. For example, Medicaid programs in Tennessee and Pennsylvania will receive federal matching funds for state planning activities to implement the EHR incentive programs under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, according to the CMS.

Finally, scores of vendors are getting ready to demonstrate their health information exchange technology at the HIMSS 2010 Interoperability Pavilion. Two of those, Axolotl and Misys, announced that their systems had achieved Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile compliance—critical for building interoperable, standards-based platforms—at the IHE Connectathon show in Chicago earlier this month. If you can’t get to Atlanta next month for this event, turn to CMIO News online, which will feature live coverage from the conference.

Mary Stevens, Editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com