Meaningful Use
ONC chief Karen DeSalvo, MD, has been nominated by President Obama to the post of Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. If she is confirmed by the Senate, she would step down as National Coordinator for Health IT, a post she has held since January 2014.
Conversations at HIMSS conferences in recent years have been largely dominated by meaningful use. This year, a great deal of talk was about going past MU and beginning to look at outcomes as opposed to process measures.
The $25 billion EMR market will continue to grow even after the government incentives for doctors and hospitals to go digital have vanished, according to new research from Kalorama Information.
"Because I said so." If you've ever been a parent of a teenager, you've likely uttered (screamed) those four words on more than one occasion. Our columnist recently recognized some similarities with the meaningful use program.
On March 20, CMS released its proposed Stage 3 rules and certification critieria for eligible hospitals and providers. This analysis by Micky Tripathi and John Halamka, MD, goes through the good, the bad and the ugly of it all.
More than 98 percent of athenahealth's medical practice clients achieved Stage 2 meaningful use in 2014. That number surpasses the MU attestation rate -- so far -- for any other EHR vendor, company officials say.
As it has with other proposed rule-makings, CMS has touted the "flexibility" and "streamlined" nature of the new Stage 3 meaningful use measures. But some physician groups don't quite see things that way.
The reaction to the long-anticipated Stage 3 meaningful use rules has been slow in coming, but a few people have managed to wade through the hundreds of pages since they were released late Friday afternoon. They're cautiously optimistic.
The new Stage 3 meaningful use rules proposed Friday by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services seek to give providers more flexibility, simplify the program, drive interoperability among electronic health records and put the focus on improved patient outcomes.
It's been almost six years since the Senate HELP Committee has revisited EHRs and interoperability, and at a hearing Tuesday there was one overarching theme among industry stakeholders: That talk is long past due.