Government & Policy
Just three weeks after landing the Department of Defense's massive, multi-billion-dollar EHR modernization project with its partner Cerner, Leidos has notched another military health win.
As they grapple with meaningful use and grumble about usability, nearly 20 percent of community hospitals polled for a recent report are "actively looking to replace" their electronic health record vendors.
Stage 3 of meaningful use is shaping up to be the most challenging and detailed level yet for healthcare providers. Among the elements that warrant attention are quality reporting, clinical decision support and security risk analysis.
Even as stakeholders await the imminent release of the final updates to Stage 3 meaningful use, there's still widespread interest in delaying it altogether. Fueling that fire is the recent passage of legislation to overhaul the physician payment system.
An idea proposed to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would move its chief information security officer up to the same level as its chief information officer, ideally to the entire agency's benefit. The tactic might also make sense in the private sector.
Not everyone is going to like this but a new study found that EHR adoption has risen in America for reasons other than the federal meaningful use incentives.
The interoperability problem is bigger than the DoD or VA and that reality is among the toughest challenges the agencies currently face.
In previous rulemakings, ONC certification criteria have hewed closely to MU objectives. New regs have been decoupled, and now about half are "requirements for functionalities that are not necessary to succeed in meaningful use."
Even as the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare Information Technology puts interoperability front and center this week, a new survey shows healthcare professionals are skeptical it can even be achieved in 10 years.
Their patience wearing thin, a group of leading hospital organizations is imploring Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell to publish pending meaningful use modifications sooner rather than later.