The State of the Meaningful Use

UPDATE:
If meaningful use were gone (ie. no more EHR incentive money or penalties requiring meaningful use), which parts of meaningful use would you remove from EHR immediately and which parts would you keep?
Responses:
*Michael Sherling, MD – Modernizing Medicine
*Shahid Shah – Influential Networks
*Joel Kanick – interfaceMD
*Michael Brozino – simplifyMD
*Dr. Michael Koriwchak
*Karen Knecht – Encore Health Resources

I recently wrote what’s been a really popular article on EMR and HIPAA called “Meaningful Use Program a Success…Depending on How You Measure Success.” I think we’re at an interesting point in the meaningful use program and it’s worth taking a step back and seeing where we’re at with meaningful use.

As I state in the other article, there’s no doubt that the EHR incentive money has moved the needle on EHR adoption. Those of us who believe that EHR holds lots of potential benefit to healthcare have to be happy about the amazing EHR adoption rate that has occurred thanks largely to $36 billion of EHR incentive money (we’ll save the question of whether we’ve gotten our money’s worth for another post).

While we could Monday Morning quarterback (appropriate football reference the week of the Super Bowl) the EHR incentive program and meaningful use, that won’t change the fact that it’s here and it’s not going anywhere. So, instead of asking whether we should have spent the money on EHR and whether we should have done meaningful use, I decided to take a deeper look at meaningful use and how we could improve the program. Which elements of meaningful use are really adding value and which parts of meaningful use should be removed? Or maybe it’s all great and we should just continue on the path we’re on.

I decided to use a simple approach to identify what’s good and what’s bad with meaningful use. I reached out to EHR vendors, doctors, practice managers, hospital executives, and other EHR experts and asked them a simple question. The answers to this question should provide a solid understanding of what’s meaningful in meaningful use and what’s not.

Here’s the question I asked:
If meaningful use were gone (ie. no more EHR incentive money or penalties requiring meaningful use), which parts of meaningful use would you remove from EHR immediately and which parts would you keep?

The concept is simple. If there wasn’t some outside influence (ie. government money) influencing the requirement to do meaningful use, which elements of MU actually provide value to the users of an EHR. Those that provide value will continue to be embraced by an EHR vendor and those that don’t will be removed. Plus, this is the reality of what’s going to happen once the EHR incentive money runs out, so let’s find this info out now.

I originally thought that this question would lead to a blog post with quotes from a variety of people offering their unique perspectives. However, every person who’s answered so far had so much to say on the topic, that each of their responses was worthy of a blog post of its own.

With that in mind, over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting all of the responses as separate posts across the network of Healthcare Scene blogs. I’ll link each of these blog posts at the bottom of this post as they are published.

Open Call for Participation
As I considered this, I realized that hundreds of other people might want to participate as well. As a health IT community I think we can make a real impact. So, I encourage everyone who reads this to publish their response to the question above.

If you have your own blog, publish it there and link back to this post so we can add your post to our list below. If you don’t have a blog, wish to remain anonymous, or would just rather have us publish it, we’re happy to publish it for you. Drop us a note on our contact us page and we can work out the details.

I believe this will become an incredible resource of information to better understand how to improve meaningful use. Once I’ve gathered a good number of responses, I’ll be reaching out to ONC and CMS to make sure they take in the body of contributed work as well. Hopefully this simple approach will be effective at gathering a response from more people than the convoluted rule making process was able to do.

Meaningful Use will go down as one of the most impactful things to hit healthcare IT and EHR in my lifetime. It behooves us to do what we can to make the most of meaningful use.