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.

Interoperabilitymaking disparate information systems communicate with each otherrepresents a tremendous undertaking for every 21st century healthcare provider. At the same time, it is a business essential. Whos got the right strategy? Check out some options

Theyre everywhere. Mobile computers are on the move in the ER and OR, atop carts as physicians make rounds, and in the hands of nurses logging vital signs at the bedside or dispensing meds. With the growing adoption of EMRs, mobile computing use among hospital-based clinicians has moved beyond standalone, knowledge-based applications such as drug reference databases and medical calculators to systems that can increase clinician productivity, reduce errors and eliminate inefficient processes.

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.

Amidst the excitement of the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) meeting in San Francisco this week comes the news that its co-founder, Martin B. Leon, MD, is once again being investigated for potential conflicts of interest and unreported income from medical device makers.