Of late there’s been a lot of concern about doctors exiting the Meaningful Use program, with many saying the financial reward was simply not worth the trouble. This trend, of course, has the medical world abuzz with discussion as to what will happen if doctors drop Meaningful Use like a stone.
Meanwhile, a few months ago, an EMR vendor brought the discussion more heat when it announced that it would no longer be Meaningful Use certified. ComChart Medical Software said, in a letter to the EMR community, “unfortunately, will not be able to meet the Stage 2 (or greater) Meaningful Use certification requirements as its requirements are technically extremely difficult to implement.”
If I were running a medical practice, and my vendor took away from me the choice of complying with Meaningful Use or not, I might be angry, but I might breathe a sigh of relief. After all, complying with Stage 2 will be a major accomplishment for virtually any practice, and if my vendor takes the choice of complying or not complying with Meaningful Use out of my hands, I won’t have people breathing down my neck saying I’m not a team player.
But even if my vendor continues to support a certified EMR for now and into the future, it’s still worth wondering whether it’s worth the trouble for doctors, half of whom are in smallish practices that don’t have much of an IT budget. After all, if my practice has completed Stage 1 I’ve already realized most of the financial benefits the program offers, notes Modern Healthcare.
So what do you think readers? Do the next stages of Meaningful Use pay off in other ways that make the struggle for compliance worth the trouble?
Of course. Even for small practices, connectivity and interoperability with other clinics and hospitals will be not only a big win, but almost a necessity if you are a specialist to continue receiving referrals from practices on compliant software. A big reason most practices went to an EMR in the first place was so they would not be isolated in paper silos. If they don’t keep up with at least Stage 2, they will simply be in an electronic silo.
I also think the govt has realized most small practices won’t reach for stage 3, hence the delay and the integration of more criteria in Stage 2.
Our practice is really not sure MU1 is worth it. We did AIU, but we don’t have a lot of measures to do MU1.
The reason? We are pediatrics. There are only 7 menu measures that even apply to us, and three of them have been determined to be of limited or useless value.
The thing is, if there is any place for prevention in medicine, it is in pediatrics…
How ironic. I could write a whole article on the process of MU1 with pediatrics, let alone MU2. In our office, we have taken to calling it “Meaningless Use.” — How’s that for a title?
Biff,
Just because a practice chooses not to attest to meaningful use doesn’t preclude them from cherry picking those parts of meaningful use that are meaningful. In your example, a practice could use an EHR and the interoperability components without having to worry about a lot of the other elements that add work to them with little added value.
John, I agree. I guess my mind considers stage 2 as an overall focus on interoperability. I guess if a practice wanted to leave a few measures off they could and just not get compensated for stage 2. Wouldn’t it be something if the state run/govt run HIEs made MU certification mandatory to use their less expensive HIEs?
Biff,
It would be something even more if insurance companies required MU. Although, I think that ship has sailed.
Unfortunately, I fear the govt will find a way to mandate into existence what it desires to accomplish through whatever means it has at its disposal, which now would appear to include govt and commercial Payors as well as state run HIEs.