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Tag: Meaningful Use

Meaningful U’s

By HANS DUVEFELT

Meaningful Use was a vision for EMRs that in many ways turned out to be a joke. Consider my list of Meaningful U’s for medical providers instead.

When electronic medical records became mandatory, Federal monies were showered over the companies that make them by way of inexperienced, ill-prepared practices rushing to pick their system before the looming deadline for the subsidies.

The Fed tried to impose some minimum standards for what EMRs should be able to do and for what practices needed to use them for.

The collection of requirements was called Meaningful Use, and by many of us nicknamed “Meaningless Use”. Well-meaning bureaucrats with little understanding of medical practice wildly overestimated what software vendors, many of them startups, could deliver to such a well established sector as healthcare.

For example, the Fed thought these startups could produce or incorporate high quality patient information that we could generate via the EMR, when we have all built our own repositories over many years of practice from Harvard, the Mayo Clinic and the like or purchased expensive subscriptions like Uptodate for. As I have described before, I would print the hokey EMR handouts for the Meaningful Use credit and throw them in the trash and give my patients the real stuff from Uptodate, for example.

I’d like to introduce an alternative set of standards, borrowing the hackneyed phrase, with a twist. MEANINGFUL U’S for medical providers:

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Putting Patients into “Meaningful Use”

By DAVID HARLOW

The Health Research Institute at PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report today entitled Putting patients into “meaningful use.” It begins with the anecdote I’ve blogged about previously regarding a diagnosis by Facebook in lieu of a PHR, which some have highlighted as a great success for social media in health care.  I am much less sanguine on that front.

The PwC report, of course, has much more than that story in it; here are the key takeaways, backed up with some survey data and interviews:

  1. Engaging external constituents may postpone achievement of “meaningful use.”
  2. Patient awareness of and access to available health IT tools is low; social, expectation, and education hurdles also exist.
  3. Patient engagement in “meaningful use” is still low, despite consumer interest.
  4. “Meaningful use” has yet to explicitly call for measuring the level of patient engagement.
  5. Health systems will need to compete for consumers in the PHR market.Continue reading…

Horses, Camels & Signals

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

On June 8, the HIT Policy Committee at ONC has approved the Workgroup recommendations for Meaningful Use Stage 2. Before diving into the details, it is worth noting that the time crunch for moving from Stage 1 to Stage 2, for those seeking incentives in 2011, was proposed to be resolved by postponing Stage 2 for these early adopters for one year. As I noted before, if you are able to attest and obtain incentives in 2011, go ahead and do that. You will be rewarded by having the opportunity to stay at Stage 1 for 3 consecutive years. The final Stage 2 ruling is not expected to occur until June 2012 and judging by previous experience with Stage 1, the recommendations approved today will be significantly relaxed by the CMS process of proposed rulemaking and public comments. So although analyzing (rejoicing or bemoaning) the various measures on this long list is a bit premature, it may be helpful to look at the general principles embedded in this new stage of Meaningful Use.

Horses

Many of the Meaningful Use more pedestrian measures have remained unchanged, have increased in intensity, or have been moved from menu to core (more on this later). These measures include such items as recording patient demographics, maintaining medications, allergies and problem lists, recording of vitals, running reports, electronic prescribing, incorporating structured lab results, medications reconciliation, using formularies, enabling clinical decision support, reporting to state and federal agencies and ensuring privacy and security of medical records.

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The Joy of Success

By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

As the year ends, I’ve spoken to many CIOs.   2011 was a hard year filled with Meaningful Use (including many upgrades to certified systems or self-certification),  5010 (the deadline for upgrading billing systems is January 1, 2012), accelerating compliance demands,  new security threats, rapidly evolving technologies, and unprecedented demand for new projects driven by the consumerization of IT.

At the same time that CIOs and IT professionals are running marathons, they are being held accountable for events that are not directly under their control.   They are not being congratulated for the miracles they create every day, but are being criticized for not moving faster.

What do I mean?

One CIO received a negative audit report because new generations of viruses are no longer stopped by state of the art anti-virus software.   Interesting.  The CIO cannot control the virus authors, nor the effectiveness of anti-virus software.    No one in the industry has solved the problem, but audit firms revel in creating fear, uncertainty and doubt at the Board level as it enhances the reputation of the auditor.

Another CIO was held accountable for infrastructure demands that were not forecasted, planned, or communicated.   CIOs do their best to be proactive, but in the world of Big Data, past trends may not predict future needs.

Another CIO was was given 10 goals and 5 unplanned urgent projects.   She completed 8 of the planned goals and all the urgent projects, yet was told she only met 80% of expectations.

In a world that expects leaders to continuously perform miracles with constrained resources in limited time,  we all need to step back and take our own steps to stop the madness.

With your own staff, celebrate the joy of success and focus on what really matters.

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EHR and Practical, Tactical Outcomes

By Jonathan Bush

I hope people are watching the news around the Meaningful Use attestation data released by CMS recently, because it is so instructive as to the difference between where we are in health care and where the deliverers of keynotes THINK we are. Since last September, we’ve been publishing our Meaningful Use (MU) dashboard data and as of this week for example, we know that 83% of our Medicare MU doctors have attested to the measures.

But our constraints as a marketplace are at the practical, tactical level. According to our analysis, some 48% of what doctors order does NOT turn into a documented update to the chart within 60 days of that order. And we all know the average EHR makes docs go slower—causing employment by hospitals in large numbers—at large losses to the hospital. And NOW, based on the CMS data, it looks like a large percentage of docs are on track to miss a bloody lay-up of a bonus from the federal government! Do you guys really think we are going to build integrated ACOs that drive down hospitalization?

Pass it on—we are further behind than we think we are, and we need to hold ourselves accountable for PRACTICAL, TACTICAL outcomes before we even talk about grand outcomes like “total quality.” So what do we do? So glad you asked. I hazard three guesses, and you guys can throw in more… or challenge mine.

1. Make a market for health information exchange. Today, HIE is universally used as a NOUN. It’s a thing you buy from Aetna or Lockheed Martin or IBM. In every other information supply chain I know of, people who WANT info PAY others to give that info to them. They pay only when the info is delivered in usable form. This is, of course, not allowed in health care, but it can be. We should get behind legislation that allows for the most rudimentary mechanism for exchange in the history of man.

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Meaningful Use — A Pinch of 3 and a Dash of 4

By Margalit Gur-Arie

While most folks are busy trying to keep up with Meaningful Use Stage 1, and Meaningful Use Stage 2 only recently emerged from the customary rulemaking process, those who plan for distant futures are providing us a glimpse of what is being considered for Meaningful Use Stage 3 and here and there a hint at the possibility of a never before mentioned Stage 4 and beyond. Since Stage 2 is still somewhat theoretical, there is little value to enumerating the proposed measures of Stage 3, which is not due to take effect until 2016, but it may prove instructive to take a general look at the overall direction that seems to be favored by policy makers for future design and use of EHR technologies. To that end, several new proposed measures seem most enlightening.

The New US Census Bureau

Stage 1 of Meaningful Use added language, race and ethnicity to the customary demographic information collected from patients, such as name, address, date of birth, gender, etc. Stage 2 proposes to add language, race and ethnicity to clinical summaries provided to patients or sent to other providers of care. So the patient header of a Stage 2 clinical summary might look something like this:

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The HIT Emperor Has Never Had Any Clothes

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By HAYWARD ZWERLING, MD

Over the last several months, I have worked to make the following the official policy of the Massachusetts Medical Society:

That the MMS will advocate to our State and Federal Representatives to end all legal constraints and financial inducements arising from the use or non-use of Office of National Coordinator (ONC) Certified EHR Technology.

That the MMS will encourage our Massachusetts Federal Legislators to introduce legislation to end the ONC’s EHR certification program, and will ask the President of the United States to immediately request that such legislation be introduced.

While the MMS’s Committee on Information Technology voted unanimously to support the above proposal, the MMS rejected the above and choose instead to make the following official MMS policy:

That the MMS will work with appropriate government entities to foster EHR innovation, affordability, and functionality by modifying the certification process for EHRs to improve patient care.

Without a doubt, ONC’s EHR certification program has stifled innovation in EHRs in particular and in health information technology (HIT) in general. In addition, the data accumulated to date has shown these ONC’s Certified EHRs have failed to have a meaningful impact on either the cost or quality of healthcare.

The 6 December 2016 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine has an article which shows that for every hour a physician is involved with direct patient care results in an additional 2 hours of EHR work (in the office/clinic) and then more EHR work from home. No wonder MDs are so dissatisfied with the practice of medicine. The accompanying editorial (Ann Intern Med. 2016;165:818-819) concludes “Now is the time to go beyond complaining about EHRs and other practice hassles and to make needed changes to the health care system ”

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Meaningful Use: RIP

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By RICHARD GUNDERMAN, MD

Richard Gunderman goodA decade ago, electronic health records were aggressively promoted for a number of reasons.  Proponents claimed that they would facilitate the sharing of health information, reduce error rates in healthcare, increase healthcare efficiency, and lower costs.  Enthusiasts included the technology companies, consultants, and IT specialists who stood to reap substantial financial rewards from a system-wide switch to electronic records. 

Even some health professionals shared in the enthusiasm.  Compared to the three ring-binders that once held the medical records of many hospitalized patients, electronic records would reduce errors attributable to poor penmanship, improve the speed with which health professionals could access information, and serve as searchable information repositories, enabling new breakthroughs through the mining of “big data.”

To promote the transition to electronic records, the federal government launched what it called its “Meaningful Use” program, a system of financial rewards and penalties intended to ensure that patients would benefit.  Naturally, this raised an important question: if digitizing health records was such a good idea, why did the federal government need to impose penalties for health professionals who failed to adopt them?  Perhaps electronic health records were not so self-evidently beneficial as proponents suggested.

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The Massachusetts Medical Society on Meaningful Use

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By MASS MED SOCIETY

Massachusetts Medical Society President Dr. Dennis Dimitri sent the following comments on Meaningful Use Stage III and the Medicare Access and Child Health Reauthorization Act  to CMS on Tuesday. THCB is pleased to feature them for our readers.  If you agree, we urge you to share with your colleagues, your elected representatives and on social media. – John Irvine  

Dear Mr. Slavitt and Dr. DeSalvo:

On behalf of the 25,000 physician, resident and medical student members of the Massachusetts Medical Society I am writing to provide our comments on Stage III Meaningful Use as it relates to the Medicare Access and Child Health Reauthorization Act. It is our understanding that the AMA is submitting extensive and detailed comments on specific aspects of the Meaningful Use Stage III, including a proposed revision of the program which we strongly urge the Department to consider going forward. Our comments will highlight several of the overarching problems with the meaningful use program as currently constructed and its impact on practicing physicians and our patients.

To put our comments into context I would like to underscore that Massachusetts physicians were early adopters of Electronic Health Records. The MMS has been committed to helping our members understand and implement successfully EHRs for well over a decade. We were one of the founding members of the MA EHealth Collaborative (MAeHC) and continue to support this important project which helps physicians choose and implement EHRs in their offices. We understand well the promise of this technology.

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Is Obamacare Working? Show us the Data

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By FRED and ALMA TROTTER

MU_stages_final
As President Obama’s healthcare reform unfolds in the last years of his administration, critics and supporters alike are looking for objective data. Meaningful Use is a funding program designed to create health IT systems that, when used in combination, are capable of reporting objective data about the healthcare system as a whole. But the program is floundering. The digital systems created by Meaningful Use are mostly incompatible, and it is unclear whether they will be able to provide the needed insights to evaluate Obamacare.

Recent data releases from HHS, however, have made it possible to objectively evaluate the overall performance of Meaningful Use itself. In turn we can better evaluate whether the Meaningful Use program is providing the needed structure to Obamacare. This article seeks to make the current state of the Meaningful Use program clear. Subsequent articles will consider what the newly released data implies about Meaningful Use specifically, and about Obamacare generally.

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