Meaningful Use

David Levin, MD, CMIO at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, discusses the challenges with meaningful use, data exchanges and the lack of "human factor" in health IT.

With mHealth becoming the norm instead of the exception, a panel at Partners HealthCare's 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium concluded that EHR vendors will have to find a way to modify their products to focus on data that the patient and his or her care team want, or they'll become obsolete.

After nearly 20 years as a CIO, I've learned that even with the best people, best planning and appropriate budgets, large, complex projects encounter issues imposed by external factors that cannot be predicted during initial project scheduling.

The 16-day government shutdown that ended Oct. 17 brought the work of the Office of the National Coordinator to a screeching halt, with cancelled meetings of high-level federal advisory committees and workgroups. But with the end of the shutdown, all hands are on deck and ready to work, according to ONC officials.

Best practices are all well and good, but sometimes it's instructive to take a look at worst practices -- the mistakes everyone should be sure to avoid. When it comes to meaningful use audits, there's simply too much at stake.

Though he no longer has authority over meaningful use regulations, former ONC chief Farzad Mostashari, MD, said that due to the nature of the federal regulatory process, it would be difficult to introduce more flexibility for complying with the Stage 2 rules.

Healthcare organizations with long-established electronic health records run the risk of "note bloat" and compromised patient safety unless they standardize physician documentation procedures and limit the amount of cutting-and-pasting doctors have to do, attendees of CHIME's Fall CIO Forum heard at a session on Oct. 9.

While physicians recognize the benefits of electronic health records, they also complain that many systems deployed nowadays are cumbersome to use and often act as obstacles to quality care, according to a new report from RAND Corporation.

During the government shutdown, only four of the total 184 on-board staffers at ONC would be retained and charged with handling "orderly phase-down and suspension of operations."

Intermountain Healthcare has signed a multi-year contract with Cerner to deploy Cerner's electronic medical record and revenue cycle technology across all of Intermountain's hospitals and clinics.