It’s one week into summer, and healthcare professionals across the country are anxiously awaiting the final definition of meaningful use. To say they are eagerly waiting would also apply, but anxiously seems more precise because there is plenty of anxiety in the waiting.
Will the criteria set for achieving meaningful use be attainable? Will it be too much too soon? It’s the timeline that has even the most loyal of champions worried.
Then there is the issue of certification. By law, to be eligible for meaningful use healthcare organizations are required to be using certified technology. Will the health IT certification organizations – known as ATCBs, or Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies, be in place and operational in time to get the job done?
Will the makers and vendors of electronic health record systems be ready?
There are many moving parts that have to work together. Talk about interoperability! Here’s a challenge for organizational interoperability.
There are plenty of unknowns to fan the fear.
In January David Muntz, senior vice president and CIO of Baylor Health Care System, had this to say in a statement CHIME issued regarding the proposed meaningful use criteria:
“Adequate time to understand the impact of these new systems and to implement them, are some of my secondary concerns. My primary concern is the time and effort required to achieve successful organizational change management.”
Concerns like Muntz’s remain as the time draws closer for the final rules, which were expected in late spring.
But, in the past six months most organizations have not been simply waiting. They have been preparing to meet the specific objectives they expect will be part of the final rule. Taking action, it seems, can relieve some of the anxiety of waiting for the “i’s” to be dotted and the “t’s” to be crossed.
The proposed rule put forth a graduated approach, which would raise the bar each year from 2011-2012 through 2015. CHIME and HIMSS support the phased approach, but they are among the industry organizations that caution against raising the bar too high, too soon. The government is not pushing too hard or moving too fast, the nation’s healthcare IT chief David Blumenthal, MD, countered in his Health IT Buzz blog on June 14.
“Historically, adopting our most fundamental medical technologies, from the stethoscope to the X-ray, were met with significant doubt and opposition,” he writes. “So it comes as no surprise that in the face of change as transformational as the adoption of health IT – even though it carries the promise of vastly improving the nation’s healthcare – some hospitals and providers push back.”
We expect some fine-tuning of the meaningful use definition, but no big changes from the proposed rule. It’s impossible to get the rules and timetable just right for every single entity, but we hope and expect that the jumpstart the HITECH Act gave healthcare will keep the momentum going through transformation, that out of the uncertainty and disruption will be born a system that is safer, more effective and more efficient.
It’s up to you.
Barry Chaiken, MD, chairman of the HIMSS Board of Directors put it this way during his opening remarks at the annual HIMSS conference in Atlanta last April.
"Through the implementation of compelling healthcare IT solutions, you must transform the way healthcare is provided in this country, not the president, not Congress, not clinicians – you. If you don't do it, it will not happen. You must step forward and you must lead."
