No Meaningful Use Without Meaningful Measures - June 2, 2010
Orlando Florida --
Last January, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) published the Notice of Proposed Rule (NPRM) which provided further definition of "Meaningful Use" and outlined the specific health IT functional measures and clinical quality measures for Stage I compliance. During the subsequent comment period, concerns were expressed by providers, vendors and other parties highlighting the fact that collecting and producing the required measures could be as challenging as implementing the software capabilities.
I believe the respondents concerns are well founded. For decades healthcare software vendors have focused on the automation of specific tasks and workflows while reporting and metrics were treated as a byproduct or the "exhaust" of the healthcare computing process. The result was a tremendous amount of "data noise" with limited content to let decision-makers at all levels understand where the organization stood and what actions were needed. To remedy the situation, extensive manual processes and spreadmarts were implemented to produce the reports needed by senior executives. To be fair, some HIT vendors recently begun to recognize that their customers need better reporting tools and have expanded their reporting capabilities but there is still a lot of work to be done.
On May 17th, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded Northrop Grumman a $34M contract to develop a National Level Repository database to process HITECH incentive payments. This database will store informatin about whether medical professionals and hospitasl are meaningful users of electronic health records, the date and amount of any incentive payments made to them and their tax identification number. It will serve as a key component of CMS' infrastructure to collect, analyze and act on the data submitted by providers and will evolve as subsequent HITECH reporting requirements evolve.
While the term "Meaningful Use" has recently become in vogue, many leading healthcare providers have been investing in physician adoption, clinical excellence, and informatics for several years. These pacesetters recognize that improving the quality of cost-effective care is impossible without the ability to capture and act intelligently on quality management and clinical information. Many of these same providers also understand that the primary reason for pursuing these goals is to improve the quality and delivery of cost-effective care while the HITECH incentives are merely a temporary facilitator. As government and payers collect additional information, providers must become more adept at using clinical and performance measures if they are to survive.
As Meaningful use requirements continue to evolve, it is clear that providers will need the data infrastructure and business intelligence capabilities in place in order to measure, monitor, act on, and submit the required measures. Just as demonstrable excellence in care delivery requires measurable results, there is "no Meaningful Use without meaningful measures".
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Sencilo HealthIT Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in EHR Cost Cutting storage, security and managed services solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including Allscripts, VMware, Dell Fujitsu EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, IBM, HP, Cisco, Microsoft, Gateway Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Orlando Lake Mary Daytona, Medical City solutions include Security "meaningful use" "meaningful usage" EMC HP IBM Quantum Compliance Gartner Magic Quadrant Quadrent LTO Daytona Beach Deland Melborne Tampa Clearwater, Dragon, Voice Recognition, Dragon Dictation
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