Healthcare providers see certainty on meaningful use

The requirements for what health IT users need to do to meet the meaningful use dictates of the stimulus law are now clearer, with the focus apparently swinging to how the IT certification process will handle them.

Healthcare providers finally have some certainty about what they need to do to be meaningful users of health IT, said Dr. Bruce Taffel, chief medical officer of SharedHealth, an healthcare information exchange and application provider.

Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator, and the HIT Policy Committee, a public/private organization, approved July 16 a list of 28 health IT functions and corresponding quality and efficiency improvement measures for 2011 that become progressively more rigorous in 2013 and 2015.

The schedule is aggressive and the criteria will be difficult for some to achieve.

“The recommendations provide more clarity at this stage, although there’s still a lot more work to be done,” Taffel said today.

The goals for meaningful use are for providers to electronically capture data, report quality measures and use the data to track patients’ medical conditions. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, providers will be eligible for increased Medicare and Medicaid payments beginning in 2011 if they demonstrate meaningful use of their certified health IT. The payments end after 2015 when health IT should be broadly adopted.

“The committee shaped their recommendations on meaningful use and the progression to achieve that on the basis of what we can do today, what the current condition is and with a fairly reasonable explanation of how you begin phasing in much of this,” Taffel said.

The policy committee also made its first recommendations on the certification process of electronic health records. Currently, the Certification Commission for Health IT (CCHIT) is the sole certifying and testing organization. The HIT Policy Committee wants more competition.

Multiple groups will be needed to perform certifications because so many more providers will seek to have the service conform to the stimulus, said Paul Egerman, retired businessman and chair of the committee’s certification and adoption work group. Read More EMR