The HIT Policy Committee held its second meeting yesterday. Concern over how the specifics of the EHR incentives program will be worked out is apparently so high that public access to the meeting had to be cut off when the audience reached the online meeting software’s limit.
The “Meaningful Use” Workgroup had clearly done a lot of good work and devoted a great deal of time to the effort. They presented a detailed matrix which mapped out a phased set of objectives and measures, establishing end point objectives for 2015 and working backwards to the interim stage at 2013 and to an initial proposal for 2011. The set of goals begs the question, “Can it be done?” I want to share with you the comments of one lone Committee member who echoed the concerns that I have been raising in past posts on Straight Talk, in the media, and in conversations with physicians and administrators. Gayle Harrell, a former Florida legislator, was the only Committee member who seemed to be concerned about the impact on the physicians. The following is a sampling of the insightful questions she posed and the comments she made:
- “Meaningful use” must be defined for specialists, not just primary care physicians. (The response from another committee member was more interesting than the comment itself—that it is not the best use of funds at this time to focus on specialists. That should wait.)
- Beware of placing too many demands on physicians for data collection.
- Recognize the excessive amount of training that is required to successfully adopt an EMR.
- Be prepared for a 33% decrease in productivity for a period of time.
- Are we setting ourselves up for failure?
- Are we putting so great a burden on providers that they won’t use the EMR?
- Is what we are asking physicians to do even achievable?
Ms. Harrell then posed the following thought-provoking questions to the Certification and Adoption Workgroup:
- Has a separate EMR certification set been considered for specialists?
- Who will be certifying the certifying bodies to make sure that the standards they set are actually relevant to “meaningful use?”
- Has the Committee addressed how to overcome adoption issues?
- How do we handle certification for innovative (non-CCHIT) companies to make sure we do not erect barriers and limit the market to the big EMR companies?
I hope that the members of the Policy Committee will address these legitimate concerns as they move forward in their efforts to define “meaningful use” to ensure that the goals are realistic and achievable.
Related posts:
I am using Dragon 10.0 for the cognitive parts like the history in my practice of Neurology. I do have an EMR (only-not a full practice program). It helps with templates and storage but I also am doing a paper backup until I feel more comfortable and find out what the czars are going to do.
The best EHR system out there without a shadow of a doubt is SRS, even though it is not yet CCHIT certified. It is cost effective, user friendly to those of us who are not computet “geeks”, and the company is extremely responsive to any needs of ours that arise. If the entire country was on SRS, a lot of our current difficulties would go away. We have had our system three years, it is totally paid for, and has allowed us to drop from 14 to 3 medical records personnel. We are a 20 provider multispecialty group in a small midwest town. I can not say enough good about SRS!