Aug 31, 2010

Meaningful use and the certification of EMRs has become a challenged for healthcare professionals and programmers alike. However we are moving forward and there are some steps to take regardless of who you are.

Posted by: Jose

Some may say that we have been going backwards as it relates to the process of meaningful use. As a matter of fact, Brian Baker, senior VP of Regents Health Resources, a Brentwood, Tenn.-based consulting firm, explains it better with these words: “"It's a bit like, 'Fire, ready, aim,”. At this month’s American Healthcare Radiology Administrator (AHRA) annual conference in Washington, Baker expressed his opinion that hospitals and physicians need to continue moving forward with their Electronic records implementation plans, even if the Health and Human Services Department is still developing guidance as it relates to meaningful use. I personally have spent quite some time looking at the meaningful use guidelines and based on my programming experience know what a challenge awaits us. I’m not going to go on a limb to say they are impossible to attain but I do consider we are quite some ways from successful achievement. Just go back and consider the turm oil that Y2K (year 2,000) created in the programming community and multiply the same by an exponential factor of 10 and you may be getting close to the reality. Remember that at that time all we needed to do was to add two fields to the date to accommodate a four year digit. Now we are talking about sharing information on multiple platforms, diverse operation systems, maintaining security of the information and ensuring synchronization of the same. Now consider that the incentives for implementation of a certified electronic medical record are expected to start in the year 2011. However, CMS and the office of the National Coordinator won’t have a permanent certification program in place until 2012. Luckily enough they agree to introduce a temporary certification process but it wasn’t until July 13, 2010 that the temporary certification process became official. Today I finally found that HHS named the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, Chicago, and the Drummond Group, Austin, Texas, as organizations qualified to test and certify electronic health-record systems as capable of meeting meaningful-use criteria under the federal IT subsidy program established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. At this stage of the game and with the hundreds, if not thousands, of software companies looking to obtain the coveted certification status and only two organizations capable of providing the same it may be a while before these programs become available. Also, considering that certification is not free I expect to see an increase in the costs of these systems and their maintenance fees. Regardless of the situation and the order of the steps the Government has taken I recommend to all eligible providers and hospitals to register with the CMS EHR Incentive Programs website, http://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms/.