Updates on Proposed Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use Criteria

The Health IT Policy Committee has published proposed Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use Recommendations and they’re open for public comment until February 25.

I’ll share a couple of particularly useful and well written analyses and commentaries by colleagues.

Health IT guru and thought leader Dr. John Halamka writes about The Proposed Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use Recommendations in his blog.

This is a great article to get a thumbnail overview of all the proposed recommendations. John lists 38 criteria and provides a quick commentary on how challenging he sees each of them. (Keep in mind that he’s CIO at one of the most HIT-advanced health systems in the country — your definition of “easy” and his might not be alike.)

It caught my eye that the more challenging criteria generally are ones involving inter-organizational health data exchange, care coordination and care management. See his comments on the following criteria: 7, 17, 20–21, and 23–34.

Dr. Halamka concludes:

…areas of concern are chemotherapy automation, recording patient communication preferences, judging clinician performance based on patient adoption of PHRs, EMAR implementation, maturity of HIE capabilities,  widespread rollout of longitudinal care planning, and public health readiness.

Writing on the Practice Fusion company blog, Dr. Robert Rowley comments on Stage 2 Meaningful Use – what should it look like?   He offers several provocative, out-of-the-box perspectives on how Stage 2 MU might change broader market dynamics:

Stage 2 is not merely an enhancement of Stage 1 – that would reduce it to simply “Stage 1a” – but instead is a whole new level….Stage 2 is about connectivity. Now that EHRs are adopted, implemented and used meaningfully, the next stage is intended to be about connecting the silos together. Stage 3, to come later, will be about inserting Decision Support between the connections, so that best practices (as well as authorizations) become part of the daily fabric of health care.

…small-scale ambulatory practices have disproportionately taken up web-based EHRs. Quite literally, tens of thousands of clinicians, especially in practices less than 10 physicians, and especially primary care practices, have chosen web-based EHRs as their preferred path to demonstrating Stage 1 Meaningful Use. In fact, it is conceivable that the whole small-size layer of health care delivery will be aggregated using web-based tools.

This turns the “center” of health IT around – no longer is the local hospital the de facto standard for local community docs. Instead, the web-based EHR, deployed nationally and capable of interfacing with a single, true standard, becomes what local hospitals, labs and HIEs need to be able to connect with. The challenge is with the legacy systems, and all their local variations – their ability to adopt true, national standards is the rate-limiting step for connectivity

Connectivity with patients will be more likely to emerge than connectivity to hospitals. Connected EHR-PHR systems will connect clinicians to their patients, and allow reporting of lab results, self-service options for access to one’s own health data and health education resources, and emergence of secure two-way messaging between the clinician and the patient…. Connection with patients will be through web portals, but also a myriad of mobile tools will allow two-way flow of data.

Given that connectivity with patients will likely emerge in a more robust way long before connectivity with local hospitals, it is likely that the patient, via their PHR, will be the conduit for health data exchange.

Wow! Great food for thought.