I’ve been writing about meaningful use a lot lately and the path forward for meaningful use. You may want to check out my post about Meaningful Use Being On the Ropes as one example. Although, even more important is this post about how meaningful use missed the patient engagement opportunity. Plus, my next post on LinkedIn is going to be about blowing up meaningful use.
In some ways, people are looking at what I write as a call to dumb down meaningful use. I don’t think that’s what I’m trying to do at all. I don’t think we should lower our standards of what we expect to get from EHR software. I just think that we should make it more meaningful. That’s why the example of patient engagement is an important one. A slight tweak to the meaningful use requirements and we’d actually get more patient engagement out of meaningful use for the same price.
I saw a great example of what I want to achieve in something called TrueMU by HelioMetrics. I think this line from their page says a lot:
“Healthcare providers are achieving Meaningful Use and realizing that standards are lower than the goals that they would like to set for their organizations.”
One of the problems with setting an expectation for people is that they then often go into default mode and just try to meet the expectation. This is happening with meaningful use. People see that as the standard they need to meet to be updated in their use of technology. If this artificial bar weren’t there, many of them would strive for even higher results.
The great part is that we can recognize this and fix it. We can think more strategically in how we’re using technology and achieve well beyond what’s defined in meaningful use. We just have to strategically make this part of our thinking.
I actually saw a lot of this happening with ICD-10. Many organizations saw ICD-10 and didn’t just choose to organize around trying to meet the ICD-10 standard. Instead, they created entire clinical documentation improvement (CDI) programs that would improve the quality of their documentation regardless of which standard they chose to use (or in this case chose to delay).
I wonder what results organizations are seeing when they stop focusing so much on meaningful use and instead focus on ways technology and EHR software can improve their organizations. If you have a story like this, I’d love to hear it.
I’d like someone with a deep understanding (deeper than mine) of the MU requirements to dissect the recent AMA request to allow more partial fulfillment of the rules. My sense is that the various requirements support each other, and that allowing a provider to meet 75% is like building 75% of a bridge. The requirements are already loaded with hedging and exceptions, and I’d like to know the practical effects of AMA’s suggestions.
Andy,
I’d been needing to look at AMA’s recommendations in more depth. With that said, I think there’s very little in MU that’s dependent on each other. Each element stands on its own merits and there’s little extra synergy by doing them all. I guess possibly some of the data capture ones for population health. Maybe there’s others I’m missing that do make it so 1 MU measure + 1 MU Measure = 3 Results