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Updates on Proposed Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use Criteria

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By VINCE KURAITIS, JD Vince_Kuraitis

The Health IT Policy Committee has published proposed Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use Recommendations and they’re open for public comment until February 25.

I’ll share a couple of particularly useful and well written analyses and commentaries by colleagues.

Health IT guru and thought leader Dr. John Halamka writes about The Proposed Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use Recommendations.

This is a great article to get a thumbnail overview of all the proposed recommendations. John lists 38 criteria and provides a quick commentary on how challenging he sees each of them. (Keep in mind that he’s CIO at one of the most HIT-advanced health systems in the country — your definition of “easy” and his might not be alike.)

It caught my eye that the more challenging criteria generally are ones involving inter-organizational health data exchange, care coordination and care management. See his comments on the following criteria: 7, 17, 20–21, and 23–34.

Dr. Halamka concludes:

…areas of concern are chemotherapy automation, recording patient communication preferences, judging clinician performance based on patient adoption of PHRs, EMAR implementation, maturity of HIE capabilities,  widespread rollout of longitudinal care planning, and public health readiness.

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The Proposed Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use Recommendations

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By JOHN HALAMKA, MD John Halamka

On January 12, the Health Information Technology Policy Committee published its proposed Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use recommendations for public comment.

Robin Raiford from Allscripts created a Quick Guide to the recommendations, making it easy to compare Stage 1, 2 and 3 in a single PDF.

Here’s my analysis of the proposed Stage 2 and 3 criteria.

1.  CPOE – Stage 1 requires more than 30% of unique patients with at least one medication in their medication list have at least one medication order entered using CPOE  Stage 2 expands this to 60% of patients for at least one medication, lab or radiology order.  Stage 3 expands this further to 80%.   CPOE orders do not need to be transmitted electronically to pharmacies/labs/radiology departments.   This is a very reasonable rate of CPOE adoption.   The hardest part of implementing CPOE is getting started, which happens in Stage 1.   Adding different types of transactions (without requiring electronic transmission to back end service providers) is more about workflow and behavioral change than technology change.

2.  Drug-drug/drug-allergy interaction checks – Stage 1 requires that interaction technology be enabled.  Stage 2 adds that it will be used for high yield alerts, with metrics for use to be defined.  The idea is that many drug databases contain too many false positive interaction rules, so adoption is slowed by alert fatigue.   If only high yield alerts are required (here’s what we’ve done at BIDMC ), clinicians are more likely to trust drug interaction decision support. Stage 3 adds drug/age checking (such as geriatric and pediatric decision support), drug dose checking, chemotherapy dosing, drug/lab checking, and drug/condition checking.  These are all reasonable goals, but automating chemotherapy protocols is quite challenging.   BIDMC built an Oncology Management System and added a full time research nurse to ensure all chemotherapy protocols are updated and accurate.    It may be asking too much to require chemotherapy dosing decision support nationwide by 2015.

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Putting the Patient First, Literally

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD Adrian Gropper

Interoperability is front and center, again. Stage 1 of HITECH was about health records for doctors. Stage 2 is about interoperability. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report is all about interoperability. At a recent state medical society meeting, the most animated questions by physicians to Dr. Blumenthal were about the lack of interoperability in electronic health records.

While HITECH is designed to regulate the behavior of technology vendors, it is struggling to encourage doctors to accept the result. Growing interest in ACOs may, at last, drive doctors to demand effective interoperability, and using the patient as a principal or intermediary can jump-start the clinical integration they seek.

For more than 5 years, interoperability has been approached from the perspective of doctors and hospitals. The results speak for themselves. As we process the innovations proposed by PCAST and consider the specifics of Stage 2 regulations, it’s time to put patients first and technology second by giving patients (and their designated agents) convenient access to their health records in their choice of electronic formats including Blue Button, CCR and CDA. Market forces will take care of the rest. Experience with Blue Button and the Direct Project shows that patient-centered and secure, directed exchange avoid the privacy and policy issues that delay technological approaches to interoperability.

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Hospital Culture and Surviving the New Landscape

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By KENT BOTTLES, MD Picture 32

A recent flight on Southwest reminded me of the importance of culture in navigating change in a rapidly evolving environment like we have in health care in the United States today. It is all too easy to focus on all the technical issues hospitals face in setting up Accountable Care Organizations to handle the inevitable global payments that will replace the current fee for service system. This blog is a plea for hospitals and doctors and consultants to pay attention to both the technical and the cultural or adaptive challenges we face in transforming a $2.5 trillion American industry.

Recent articles on companies outside of health care have highlighted how important culture has been to the success or failure of Southwest Airlines, QVC, and Zagat to respond to changing business conditions. Southwest’s COO states “our culture is our biggest competitive strength,” and the flight attendant and pilots’ union worry about how the recent purchase of AirTran will affect their unique culture. I have seen Southwest pilots help clean up the cabin, and the flight attendant on my recent trip told me she was giving up her day off because the company needed her help. QVC is trying to use the same methods and culture that made selling on TV popular with Internet customers. And Zagat, which had cultural troubles moving from book format to online, is now hoping that smart phone applications will reinvigorate their business model.

Harvard’s Ron Heifetz differentiates between technical and adaptive work and I have found this concept useful in working with health systems responding to payment reform. Everyone involved in hospital physician integration efforts will need to undergo a cultural (adaptive) shift because the healthcare reform law and the transition from fee for service to global payments mean the old ways of doing things are not sustainable.

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What Would A Truly Patient-Centered ACO Look Like?

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By KENT BOTTLES, MDBottles

Health care leaders are busy talking to attorneys and consultants about how to set up Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). A recent Advisory Board survey found that 73 per cent of hospital finance executives said that creating such an organization was a top priority for their health system.

Last year my most popular keynote topic was patient-centered medical home creation; this year everyone wants a presentation on ACOs.

However not everyone has jumped on the ACO bandwagon. Bruce Bagley, MD of the American Academy of Family Practice was recently quoted as saying, “There are probably no experts about ACOs. It’s a developing concept.” And Jeff Goldsmith, PhD, of the University of Virginia stated at the same conference: “I think this is a stupid idea. Managed care without the risk – that’s like gin and tonic without the gin. How do you end up making choices if you’re not forced to make them?”

I started thinking about what an ACO would look like if it was truly patient-centered. What if we designed an ACO that gave patients what they say they really want?

Don Berwick wrote an article in Health Affairs in 2009 that examined what patient-centered should mean, and since he became the head of Medicare in 2010 it might make sense to start there. After all, Medicare is pushing the ACO concept by creating pilot projects and encouraging the shift from fee for service payments to global payments for medical care reimbursement.

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Will ACO IT Models Be Walled Gardens or Open Platforms?

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By VINCE KURATISKuratis, JD

Will ACO (accountable care organization) IT models be walled gardens or open platforms?  i.e., will ACO IT platforms focus on exchanging information within the provider network of the ACO, or will they also be able to exchange information with providers outside the ACO network? (If the question still isn’t clear, click here for a further explanation.).

One POV: ACO’s Will Need Open IT Platforms

Mike Cummens, M.D., associate chief medical information officer at 750-physician Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, is quoted in a recent article in Healthcare Informatics. Dr. Cummens argues for an open ACO IT approach:

There will be an emphasis on transfer-of-care summaries and how to facilitate information sharing across the full continuum of care, he said. “For instance, you will have to work into care management plans the notification of home health agencies,” Cummens added. “In an ACO model, you will have to have methods in place to communicate all this information to providers who are not part of your own organization. People will have an option to see providers outside an ACO, so you will need to be able to transfer care summaries and discharge summaries outside the ACO.”

Also, because patient involvement is a key part of ACOs, the IT infrastructure will have to support patients signing off on their care plans and document their progress toward reaching goals, he noted. That will involve some type of self-management tools and personal health record access to their own data.

Cummens noted that the patient-centered medical home is geared toward an individual practice, and meaningful use metrics are geared toward providers, but ACOs will require managing data across enterprises. “When we visualize this and realize we are dealing with multiple electronic health records, the infrastructure for ACOs really has to ride on top of that,” he said. He sees the need for a new type of system, probably outside the EHR, that can bridge organizations, allow for risk assessment and analytics and reach down into tools for day-to-day management. That’s a tall order.

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Health IT and the Other Disparities

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

On October 18 2010, Dr. Blumenthal published a letter to EHR vendors titled "Health IT and Disparities"  urging them to “include providers who serve minority communities in their sales and marketing efforts”. Reiterating the assumed benefits of Health IT to both quality of care and efficiency of care delivery, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology stressed the importance of EHR vendors working together “to provide EHR adoption opportunities for physicians and other healthcare providers working within underserved communities of color”. This is obviously an important and welcome appeal. Physicians who provide care for impoverished minority communities usually lack the means to purchase EHRs and perhaps some EHR vendors will heed Dr. Blumenthal’s request and make special arrangements for these doctors and their clinics. The stimulus incentives may also help. But how about those who serve equally impoverished populations and are practically barred from incentives?

In my home State of Missouri there are about 350 Rural Health Clinics (RHC) serving a state which with very few exceptions is one big Medically Underserved Area/Population (MUA/MUP) which is a geographical area or a population designated by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) as having: too few primary care providers, high infant mortality, high poverty and/or high elderly population. For the uninitiated, RHCs are designated by CMS and have to meet certain requirements. The practice has to be located in a rural area and it has to provide team care, which is all the rage now, meaning that a Nurse Practitioner or a Physician Assistant and a Certified Nurse Midwife have to be on premise and team up with the physician in providing patient care. RHCs can be independent practices or they can be owned by rural hospitals. Either way RHCs are paid by Medicare differently than a practice without RHC designation. RHCs are required to submit reports of their operational costs and their total number of visits. Based on these two parameters the reimbursable cost per visit is calculated by Medicare. The entire process is complex and subject to rules, regulations and caps. The main point here is that RHC providers are not reimbursed according to the regular Medicare physician fee schedule and therefore will be unable to receive EHR incentives under Medicare. A few RHCs may qualify for Medicaid incentives, but in most cases they don’t have the prerequisite 30% Medicaid patients.

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Have We Found the Magic Acronym?

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By J.D. KLEINKE

Sometimes, reality just delivers – this morning in the form of some funny Google search results.

Aghast at the fluidity of my acronymic spew in an email exchange with a colleague (“ACOs can be MSOs instead of PHOs because Stark now safe-harbors EMRs for IPAs, so the PPMs and hospitals can share IT to TPA the risk piece, and…”), I decide to brush up on these new-fangled entities in the health reform law called “ACOs,” or Accountable Care Organizations.

In case you’re still stuck back on page 689 of the law, the ACO is This Year’s Model – the TLA (Three Letter Acronym) with Big Mo.  An ACO is a contracting entity, codified in the health reform law, through which a group of physicians and a hospital or several hospitals work together to share in the financial risks and rewards associated with patient care.  Sound eerily familiar? To me, the concept sounds like a bad movie I once saw – a really long and dreary drama with nothing close to a Hollywood ending.  Or maybe it was a bad waking dream I had while dozing at a population risk management conference in 1998, thanks to a slight fever, two Sudafed, and half a bottle of Robitussin.  Or maybe it was something I read that same year.

Hospital and physician integration has become ‘thinkable’ now, if only because physicians and hospitals finally recognize that they will sink or swim together, thrown as they have been into the same turbulent, unforgiving waters of a self-correcting marketplace. As a reaction to the cost crises of the 1980s and early 1990s, government and private purchasers – directly and through MCOs [managed care organizations] – have blamed both hospitals’ and physicians’ self-serving clinical behaviors, inefficient practices, and excess capacity as the main driver of their own health care spending woes.  This is precisely why the purchasers turned the MCOs on them in the first place.  This is why MCOs have been positioned as the enemy of both types of providers.  And the enemy of my enemy is my friend, or so the thinking goes.

OMG, that was some big thinking! So the purpose of the 1998 vintage ACOs was to punch the MCOs (i.e., the 1998 vintage HMOs/EPOs/PPOs/POSPs/MOUSEs) in the nose. OK!  But more on this little artifact in a moment.

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The Health Reform (Almost) Everyone Loves

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By MICHAEL MILLENSON Michael Millenson

Come with me to the land of happy health reform. It is a place where Republicans and Democrats find common ground, a place where physicians, hospitals and health insurers sit together as partners, a place where criticism is respectful, not rancorous. It is the world of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).

What are ACOs, and why have they escaped the general onslaught of opprobrium from Obamacare opponents?

The term Accountable Care Organization was originated by Elliott Fisher of the Dartmouth Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences, picked up by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and then enshrined in Section 3022 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as health care reform). The language is explicitly designed to use financial incentives to change the health care delivery system.

ACOs are defined less by form than by function. A group of physicians, possibly with a hospital, agrees to manage the full spectrum of care for a defined population of at least 5,000 Medicare beneficiaries for a minimum of three years. If the ACO meets certain targets for quality and cost-effectiveness, it gets to keep part of the savings.

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Unconscious in the Emergency Department

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By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

As State Health Information Exchanges and Federal efforts (NHIN Connect/NHIN Direct) implement the data sharing technology that will enable all providers in the country to achieve Meaningful Use Stage 1, I’m often asked  “but when will this healthcare information exchange technology be able to retrieve all my records from everywhere when I’m lying unconscious in the Emergency Department and cannot give a history?”

Here are my thoughts about the trajectory we’re on and how it will lead us to supporting the “Unconscious in the ED” use case.

Meaningful Use Stage 1 is about capturing data electronically in EHRs.  Getting healthcare data in electronic form is foundational to any data exchanges.   By 2011 we should have medication lists, problem lists, allergies, and summaries available from EHRs.

The data exchanges in Stage 1 are simple pushes of data from point A to point B – from provider to public health, from provider to provider, and from provider to pharmacy.   There is no master patient index, no record locator service, and no centralized database containing everyone’s lifetime health record.

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