Its hard to believe that 9 months ago the term meaningful use wasnt in our everyday vocabulary. Now it is top of mind and a topic of nearly every health IT strategy meeting. While a final definition isnt now expected until Q2 2010, for sure it will include reporting quality measures and being able to share information among clinics, hospitals and government health agencies.

Since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) in February, much debate and a flurry of activity has centered on the economic encouragement offered to healthcare providers for the adoption and use of EMRs.

WellStar Health Systema not-for-profit system in Atlanta comprised of five hospitals and a 400-physician group practiceis dedicated to providing world-class healthcare for a community of 600,000.

Meaningful use. Learn those two words. Understand them. They likely will consume our professional lives for years to comeif they havent already begun to. Meaningful use is, of course, the standard by which hospitals and medical practice will qualify for federal stimulus funding for adopting electronic health records. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the health IT portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, calls for providers to demonstrate meaningful use of health IT starting in 2011.

The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO) and the openEHR Foundation have begun a collaborative program on developing clinical terminologies and archetype-based EHR structures.

As physicians, we have a profound influence on others who look to us for leadership. If clinical leaders are disengaged and misaligned with an organizational mission, change strategies can fail before they begin. Where physicians go, the rest of the organization will followand the most successful healthcare leaders in the nation have figured this out.

The idea of meaningful use, mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has been whittled down into defining the enigmatic term meaningful. In this search, discussions within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) have focused on the practice of medicine, not the implementation of IT. If the meaningful use of information systems does not have an obvious and profound impact on the safety and quality of healthcare, then it ceases to have meaning.

The use of iodinated- and gadolinium-based contrast agents, which are frequently used during CT and MRI scans, has a low rate of adverse effects on patients, according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.