Posted by EHR Analyst on Mon, Aug 30, 2010 @ 11:44 PM
HHS today named CCHIT (Certification Commission for Health Information Technology), 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.
"This is a crucial step because it ensures that certified EHR products will be available to support the achievement of the required meaningful-use objectives, that these products will be aligned with one another on key standards and that doctors and hospitals can invest with confidence in these certified systems," David Blumenthal, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, said in a news release Monday.
Read here more for more details.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Sat, May 08, 2010 @ 12:41 PM
The Health IT Policy Committee
endorsed comments on a plan by the Office of the National Coordinator to offer permanent certification of
electronic health record systems, including a provision to monitor EHRs after they are purchased to ensure providers are installing the proper technology.
The advisory panel okayed this and other features of permanent certification described in a proposed rule published by ONC in March. The ONC is expected to finalize its plan for permanent certification of EHRs sometime before the end of the 2010.
Permanent certification describes requirements for testing whether EHRs deliver the functions required for meaningful use. A separate temporary certification plan has been designed containing a more limited set of requirements to help providers get EHRs up and running in the first year of the meaningful use program.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Sat, Apr 10, 2010 @ 10:16 AM
The federal Health IT Policy Committee has recommended that health IT vendors use labels to clarify that their EHR Software is certified to satisfy first-stage requirements for meaningful use in order to ward off potential confusion among buyers about whether systems they are considering will qualify them for the incentive program.
Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has recently asked for comments about its plan to offer "temporary" certification of health IT products and systems which is designed to qualify health IT systems for first stage of the meaningful use plan, which begins next year. A permanent plan will be developed to certify health IT products for future phases of meaningful use.
Under the proposed rule, vendors would be directed to label their products with the date the product was certified. The committee also recommended that technology that is certified during 2010 should contain a label specifying that it has been certified for Stage 1 requirements only.
To help providers keep track of certified products, the committee also urged ONC and certifying organizations to maintain a Web site listing the names of vendors and their product version numbers that have received certification.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Sun, Jan 24, 2010 @ 09:08 PM
According to the 94,700-member American Academy of Family Physicians, while it "supports the goals" behind the proposed regulations, it believes that the regulations-as proposed-impose hurdles that will challenge small- and mid-sized practices' ability to qualify for the ARRA's health IT subsidies.
A chief concern is that collecting and reporting performance data could become an administrative burden, said Steven Waldren, director of the AAFP's Center for Health IT. He said that his recommendation for the final rules would be to "focus on meaningful use and not reporting on the meaningful use."
Physicians who meet the requirements could receive $44,000 to help pay for their purchase of an electronic health record system.
"They should not implement health IT to get the $44,000," Waldren said, they should do it to improve quality and efficiency and to move toward transforming their practices into a patient-centered medical home. "And, if you do that, you'll get $44,000. I don't think there's anything in there that physicians shouldn't be doing or striving for."
Waldren added that the AAFP is specifically encouraged by the proposed regulations' focus on care coordination, quality and patient-centered care, and he also said the AAFP supports the rules' promotion of using electronic prescribing; clinical decision support; analysis and reporting of evidence-based measures of quality and performance; and the sharing of health information and educational resources with patients.
For full details, read this article from Modern Healthcare.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 @ 09:25 AM
Eighty-five percent of healthcare providers believe their ambulatory
electronic medical record software will enable them to meet the 2011
meaningful use deadlines being considered by the federal government, according to a new report from KLAS.
However, many respondents say their technology lacks adequate reporting functionality.
Providers also noted a number of functional areas that are still lacking. Foremost among these were EMR reporting tools, patient access to medical records and the ability to share key clinical data.
"Reporting will obviously play a vital role in a provider's ability to meet the proposed meaningful use standards, yet more than 17 percent of providers say reporting is difficult or impossible with their current tools - and another 24 percent report needing specific technical expertise to manipulate the tools provided," said Mark Wagner, director of ambulatory research for KLAS and author of the report.
"To help their clients meet the substantial reporting requirements for meaningful use, many EMR vendors will need to increase the number and complexity of their canned reports, provide a stand-alone reporting application or add a third-party tool that can pull the required data," Wagner added.
For more details, read this article.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Thu, Dec 31, 2009 @ 01:13 AM
HHS issued two sets of much-anticipated federal regulations that significantly further the government's healthcare information technology adoption agenda. The first set of regulations lists the "meaningful use" criteria that healthcare providers must meet to qualify for federal IT subsidies based on how they use their electronic health records. The second set of regulations lays out the standards and certification criteria that those EHRs must meet for their users to collect the money.
The meaningful use regulations are proposed regulations subject to a 60-day public comment period after which HHS would issue final regulations. The EHR certification regulations are interim final regulations that take effect in 30 days with a 60-day public comment period. HHS said final regulations will be published in 2010.
Under the proposed meaningful use regulations, eligible healthcare providers must use their EHRs to: improve the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare services; reduce healthcare disparities; engage patients and their families; improve the coordination of care; improve population and public health; and ensure the privacy and security of personal medical information.
Under the interim final EHR regulations, EHRs must be able to securely exchange information among providers and between providers and patients using standardized data elements and technologies. The regulations outline standardized formats for such things as clinical summaries; medical descriptions of clinical conditions and test results; and how that information is exchanged over the Internet.
Source: Modern Healthcare
Posted by EHR Analyst on Mon, Dec 28, 2009 @ 11:36 PM
There is a push going on for push messaging, a likely first step in rolling out a proposed national health information network in time for healthcare organizations to use electronic health record systems in a "meaningful manner" and qualify for federal EHR subsidy payments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In late October, David Blumenthal, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS called for pause in the planning of the NHIN.
Earlier this week, in testimony before a federal healthcare IT advisory panel, on blogs and postings to online discussions, what is beginning to emerge is the outline of what the healthcare IT world was put on hold to wait for, an outline of a "lighter" NHIN than has been the focus of much planning and development work in the past.
It is an NHIN still based on the Internet but with, in the short run at least, a reduced scope. The new, revised NHIN will focus on ready access and ease of use by healthcare providers who will be under the gun to purchase, implement and then "meaningfully" use by 2011 EHRs in time to receive the first subsidy payments under the Medicare portion of the program.
The stimulus law, defines meaningful use rather simply. To achieve meaningful use, providers must use a "certified" EHR for electronic prescribing, reporting quality-improvement measures and performing health information exchange "to improve the quality of healthcare, such as promoting care coordination."
Read full report here.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Wed, Dec 16, 2009 @ 08:03 PM
The federal definition and criteria for the "meaningful use" of electronic health-record systems seems to be getting delayed. It was due today, but that deadline passed today at noon.
Excerpts of an article from Modern Healthcare authored by Joseph Conn.
According to the author, the federally chartered Health Information Technology Policy Committee took the time Tuesday to parse some recommendations from one of its work groups on what to do about standards for electronic laboratory orders. The policy committee then hustled up a vote to accept the eleventh-hour recommendations so they still could be considered by rulemakers before the first round of meaningful-use criteria are published.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 called for creation of the HIT Policy Committee to advise HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on a host of subjects. Committee members have spent a significant portion of their time since the group was launched in May dealing with meaningful-use recommendations. Earlier this year, the HIT Policy Committee made several suggestions to the ONC on the meaning of "meaningful use."
It recommended three tiers of increasingly more stringent criteria lasting for periods of two years each. The years 2011, 2013 and 2015 were chosen as the starting and ratcheting up dates to coincide with break points in the subsidy payment regime. The recommendations the HIT Policy Committee voted on Tuesday came from its information exchange work group and specified standards for use by providers when electronically ordering laboratory tests for a patient.
Work group Co-chairman Micky Tripathi of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative said 70% to 80% of lab transactions are not performed using EHR systems. The failure of the healthcare industry to come together on a common set of messaging standards and their implementation guides for labs is "in many ways, the Achilles' heel of meaningful use," he said.
"There are a lot of standards out there that are not used, and many standards that are used in various ways," Tripathi said. In addition to 5,200 commercial labs, there are 8,500 hospital laboratories, 400 public health laboratories and 115,000 small laboratories in physician offices and clinics, Tripathi said.
A lack of consensus on laboratory standards has remained an intractable barrier to interoperability for multiple reasons, Tripathi said. Large national reference laboratories control 25% of the market, he said, but are only part of a contingent of commercial laboratories, all of which are ineligible for EHR subsidy payments under the stimulus law. Thus, they won't receive direct incentives to respond if laboratory standards are included in the meaningful use criteria.
Commercial labs are covered under the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvements Amendments of 1988 or CLIA, but the law permits variance in regulation by the states. Many states require that lab results only be transmitted to the providers who ordered the tests, which precludes direct transmission to a patient through his or her personal health record, for example.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Thu, Dec 10, 2009 @ 01:41 AM
David Blumenthal, M.D., national coordinator for health information technology, on December 7, 2009, posted a stimulus-related update on ONC's blog, called Health IT Buzz.
He announced that meaningful use criteria (from CMS) would be coming within weeks, with electronic health records certification plans in early 2010. Those rules had been expected along with meaningful use rules by the end of 2009.
Original Text from the Blog:
At ONC, we're making tremendous progress to achieve our goals and today, I wanted to provide a quick update and an important new announcement.
Although I'm often out front in communicating our goals and progress, there is an entire organization - plus numerous collaborating agencies, our federal advisory committees, and other stakeholders - behind me working harder, and faster than ever, to get the right pieces in place to meet very aggressive timelines.
You have seen evidence of that work already with our announcements of major grant programs to help establish health information exchange and grow the health IT workforce. And you'll see even more in the weeks and months ahead as we roll out new projects.
Already, we're on the way to getting the Regional Extension Centers and the State Health Information Exchange program established early in 2010. In fact, on a technical assistance call on Friday about the extension center program, we announced that, due to a strong response for applications, there will be approximately 30 extension center awards made in January and the remainder in March. This should assure support is in place for providers looking to become meaningful users of EHR systems leading up to 2011.
Of course, this isn't all we're doing. You will see meaningful use criteria (from CMS) in a matter of weeks. We also anticipate publishing in early 2010 our proposed plans for establishing a new certification program, which we believe will enable most vendors to have their products certified by 2011. And there will be a number of other awards and programs rolling out between now and the end of the first quarter. This past week's announcements of the Beacon Community Program and additional workforce training grants continue to build the needed foundation for electronic health records throughout the nation.
We're working hard and we're working fast, but we're also working smart and ensuring that the necessary programs and standards serve as a sound foundation.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Mon, Dec 07, 2009 @ 11:47 PM
At a policy conference sponsored by the National Committee for Quality Assurance in Washington, David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health information technology at HHS, said that a recent study of physician practices showed that 20% were using
electronic health records in 2008. Of those users, 90% said they were satisfied with the technology "and could point to quality improvements" as a result of using electronic records.
Even for those physicians who had complaints about using the technology, "it's clear that very few physicians would go back to paper-based records," he said.
Blumenthal reiterated his commitment to issue proposed rules on the so-called "meaningful use" of EHRs last month, as well as offer grants to establish 70 health IT regional extension centers nationwide that will offer technical assistance, guidance and information on best practices to support and accelerate providers' efforts to become meaningful users of EHRs.
Source: Modern Healthcare News