by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | February 11, 2011
From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Getting there
Meaningful use experts can offer advice to facilities paving their way to compliance. First thing’s first: get familiar with the objectives and the measures that are required to demonstrate meaningful use. Then, come up with “a plan of attack” and run a gap analysis, figuring out current compliance percentages and areas where additional resources, training or products are needed, advises Thomas.
Stimulus dollars are only available for EHRs that are certified by an authorized testing and certifying body. Facilities need to make sure to not only get their main piece of software certified, but also that the connections and data moved between different systems meet the standards the ONC put in place, says IRM’s Johnston.
Hospitals should choose a company with a long term track record of success that provides a broad portfolio of products that will be able to support the hospital in stages two and three of meaningful use. HIMSS offers an Online Buyer’s Guide, which Boone likens to a “HIT yellow pages.” The public, searchable database enables providers to search health IT products by specific product lines and categories.
Once the software is in place, adoption must take center stage, an effort made easier if the IT-side partners with a strong clinical advocate. “With an IT champion, you run into the same problem that IT has always run into in health care — how to make your technology investment pertinent to the business, pertinent to patient care and not just put in technology because it’s cool,” says Phoenix Children’s Sarnecki.
Collaboration between the IT and clinical realms should be supported by executive leadership in the organization and driven top-down from the CEO, as widespread employee adoption is critical. “I see a lot of implementations fall through or fail because of [the lack of] key stakeholder commitment to it,” says Siemens’ Castillo.
Experts offer a further word of caution. Phoenix Children’s Vaidya warns against hastily deploying EHRs to take advantage of the first wave of the available stimulus money. “There’s a lot of good literature on unintended and negative consequences of IT implementations that have been done too fast or have been done too early,” he says. “The real reason for meaningful use is to improve quality but if you’re somehow blinded with the rush to meet those requirements and reap the incentive dollars, you shouldn’t do it faster than you can begin [correctly].”
HIT moves ahead
Just four days after CMS and ONC opened registration to eligible professionals and hospitals, about 4,000 providers signed up for the incentive program, according to CMS. And in January, discussions also began about stage two measures. The transformation of the nation’s health care system through IT is well underway.
