Whats new?
Hitting my inbox this week were some EHR vendors' announcements that their products or parts of them have been upgraded with meaningful use requirements in mind. It’s not always easy figure out how much in these products is actually new. What is clear is that meaningful use has been out of the gate for 10 days now, and here comes a wave of meaningful-use-ready offerings.
It’s not quite like the Y2K paroxysms that the IT world endured a decade ago, and health IT vendors should be lauded for wanting to get ahead of meaningful use requirements and stay ahead—it isn’t just good business, it’s also stay-afloat business now. Rivals across the street are gearing up to show how they can help customers achieve Stage 1 maningful user status.
This is part of the federal government’s intent with the meaningful use rules and certification criteria: establish the ground rules for what needs to be in an electronic health record system, and a reliable testing framework for EHR vendors and developers to prove these systems work.
At HIMSS in March, we listened as officials from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, among others, assured us that the government would not be in the software business. However, it’s clear that federal guidelines will drive the definition as well as the scope of major health IT initiatives for the foreseeable future. Some standardization might be just what the doctor ordered.
It’s also telling that federal- and local-level conversations continue about the dangers of a rush to implement an EHR, as well as possible security concerns. Hospitals and individual physicians alike should be wary of vendors claiming to offer a complete, compliant EHR with a six-week or three-month implementation time.
A recent AMA statement isn’t encouraging, either: The association has found no EHR can help buyers meet all meaningful use requirements for Stage 1, and small group practices and individual practitioners will have the most difficulties becoming meaningful users.
However, a more heartening survey from Embarcadero Technologies found that, even before the final rules were announced, 85 percent of responding health IT professionals indicated that they are either in the midst of an EHR project or plan to start one within the next 18 months. This might be a case of early adopters being more likely to complete the survey—we suspect this is the case with at least some of the responders to our own recent CMIO Top Trends survey, which yielded comparable results. Other research has pegged physician adoption of EHR technology at a much lower level, with little movement.
The meaningful use clock is now ticking louder and there is a lot to do, but proceeding with caution is more crucial than ever.
Mary Stevens, Editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com
It’s not quite like the Y2K paroxysms that the IT world endured a decade ago, and health IT vendors should be lauded for wanting to get ahead of meaningful use requirements and stay ahead—it isn’t just good business, it’s also stay-afloat business now. Rivals across the street are gearing up to show how they can help customers achieve Stage 1 maningful user status.
This is part of the federal government’s intent with the meaningful use rules and certification criteria: establish the ground rules for what needs to be in an electronic health record system, and a reliable testing framework for EHR vendors and developers to prove these systems work.
At HIMSS in March, we listened as officials from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, among others, assured us that the government would not be in the software business. However, it’s clear that federal guidelines will drive the definition as well as the scope of major health IT initiatives for the foreseeable future. Some standardization might be just what the doctor ordered.
It’s also telling that federal- and local-level conversations continue about the dangers of a rush to implement an EHR, as well as possible security concerns. Hospitals and individual physicians alike should be wary of vendors claiming to offer a complete, compliant EHR with a six-week or three-month implementation time.
A recent AMA statement isn’t encouraging, either: The association has found no EHR can help buyers meet all meaningful use requirements for Stage 1, and small group practices and individual practitioners will have the most difficulties becoming meaningful users.
However, a more heartening survey from Embarcadero Technologies found that, even before the final rules were announced, 85 percent of responding health IT professionals indicated that they are either in the midst of an EHR project or plan to start one within the next 18 months. This might be a case of early adopters being more likely to complete the survey—we suspect this is the case with at least some of the responders to our own recent CMIO Top Trends survey, which yielded comparable results. Other research has pegged physician adoption of EHR technology at a much lower level, with little movement.
The meaningful use clock is now ticking louder and there is a lot to do, but proceeding with caution is more crucial than ever.
Mary Stevens, Editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com