Running with meaningful use

Mary Stevens, Editor

I have a new variation on the invocation about living in interesting times: “May you attend a meeting of CMIOs shortly after the final rule for meaningful use comes out.” Many years ago, Ojai, Calif., was the fictional hometown of TV’s Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man. Thirty-something years after that show aired, “bionic” is part of the American lexicon, and in Ojai, AMDIS Physician-Computer Symposium Conference attendees were already performing the very real, yet, in some ways superhuman feat of figuring out the ramifications of the final rule for meaningful use.

While there is trepidation, there also is energy to tackle the era of meaningful use. The digestion and analysis of meaningful and EHR certification will no doubt continue for months, if not years. But, in less than three days after the release of the final rule, health IT groups have already put together their take on this 864-page framework, along with support materials.

AMDIS presenters and an advisor from ONC also weighed in at Ojai. And the analysis won’t end there.

CPOE has emerged as a linchpin of meaningful use, which will send some facilities back to the drawing board to rewrite their implementation plans. At the AMDIS event, several CMIOs wondered if the federal government hadn’t made meaningful use too easy—which is contrary to comments from the American Hospital Association and other groups, which worry that meaningful use is still unattainable for many healthcare organizations.

Meaningful use means data challenges, according to a HIMSS Analytics report: “The challenges that organizations face today with regard to clinical analytics are only going to be amplified in the future, as is evident in the later stages of meaningful use criteria. The need for clinical analytics is going to expand not only as healthcare organizations gain the ability to uncover more sophisticated analytics, but also by the steep and rapid increase in available clinical data as the result of ARRA-based incentives,” the report stated.

Alng similar lines, a survey by the eHealth Initiative shows that the majority of ARRA implementation activity will occur at the state level, as will provisions in healthcare reform that build on health IT and HIE. About 66 percent of respondents agreed that regional extension centers and the National Health IT Research Center will be vital to educating providers about adoption and meaningful use of health IT.

The eHealth Initiative survey found that implementation of ARRA programs will be the dominant story in the years ahead, and that the value of HIE is not clearly understood.

Nevertheless, now that the rule is here, facilities are expected to take the requirements and run with them, just maybe not at Steve-Austin-like bionic speed.

Mary Stevens, editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com