Finding Meaning in Meaningful Use – Justin Barnes

I spend a lot of time traveling to conferences and engagements around the country speaking on meaningful use (MU) in my role as chairman of the Electronic Health Record Association. In these travels it’s been gratifying to see that everyone invested in healthcare has not lost sight of the goals of improved patient care that is driving this national endeavor.

By increasing the capacity of health information technology (HIT) and the adoption of electronic health records (EHR), these patient-centric goals are no less than increasing access to quality care, improving care coordination and stabilizing rising healthcare costs by reducing waste, fraud and abuse. While these are lofty goals to attain in the next five to six years or so during the meaningful use incentive payment periods, they are certainly achievable.

A great foundation of HIT and interoperability standards has already been created by organizations such as Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) and the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP). A great base for EHR certification has been built by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and its volunteer workgroup structure. All of these entities have a strong public and private collaboration and have drawn active leadership participation from thousands of dedicated industry leaders.

As we await the final Stage One meaningful use criteria, I also hope (and see so far) that the standards have been created at a level that eligible professionals (care providers) and eligible hospitals can achieve without significant issue. There needs to be a healthy balance of goals and criteria that propel our nation’s healthcare system forward in the electronic age, but also not so high in the first stage that our nation’s care providers and hospitals fail and give up on adopting EHRs and other healthcare technology innovations.

This is a delicate balance that can be achieved if we build upon the past six years of EHR functionality and workflow progression already in use such as electronic prescribing, computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and quality reporting. The challenge now is to advance functionality and reporting within reasonable but increasable thresholds of provider use.

We also need to keep an eye on avoiding new burdens onto care providers and hospitals during this process, such as impractical accounting of disclosure reports that are of no value to patients. We need to ensure a safe and secure healthcare system but not interfere with daily workflows and a care provider’s ability to offer the highest quality of care.

As we close in on understanding the final rules for EHR meaningful use, the EHR certification process and related HIT standards, I hope the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) build from the base already created to afford all care providers, hospitals, patients, consumers, vendors and other key stakeholders the best runway to achieve our main HIT adoption and meaningful use goal: that of enhanced patient outcomes.