Value of Meaningful Use – Perspective from EHR Executive at simplifyMD

The following is a guest blog post by Michael Brozino, in response to the question I posed in my “State of the Meaningful Use” call to action.

If MU were gone (ie. no more EHR incentive money or penalties), which parts of MU would you remove from your EHR immediately and which parts would you keep?

Michael Brozino
Michael Brozino
Michael Brozino, CEO of simplifyMD

If Meaningful Use were no longer a requirement, we would keep our software the same. I say this because there is nothing in our system that was built within the requirements of Meaningful Use that weren’t deployed with the intent of improving patient engagement, enhancing public health, promoting health record portability and improving software interoperability. The fact that 100 percent of our users who have chosen to attest for MU have been successful is certainly a benefit, but we don’t see much reason to remove any functionality unless the user’s benefit diminishes significantly and it becomes too expensive to support and implement.

Rather, if MU disappeared, we would hope that the entire healthcare industry or government would implement centralized, universal healthcare data exchanges and/or hubs to ease interoperability and promote uniformity. Features such as personal health records, electronic delivery of labs and receipt of orders, syndromic surveillance data, state immunization records, clinical decision support rules, secure patient messaging, and many others could have been easily implemented if the government fully committed to putting them in place. By only going halfway, standardization is left to a group of players that by their very nature are opinionated and independent.

ePrescribing, for example, has thrived because a central hub exists to allow competitors to quickly join the network. Competition between these organizations is now about who delivers the best user experience, the best customer support, and who adds the most value to their product. If such a central exchange were created for the interoperability requirements in MU, we would have already surpassed the goals of Stages 2 and 3 by 2014.

See other responses to this question here.

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