Jul 10th, 2009 by Ben CCHIT to ONC: “Hold Your Meaningful Use Horses”
….we believe most of the measures proposed for 2011 would be difficult to achieve by providers who have not already begun EHR implementations.
In a letter addressed to the Policy and Standards Committees of the Office of the National Coordinator, CCHIT stated that the draft meaningful use provisions for 2011 are overly ambitious. CCHIT also performed a gap analysis between their 2008 certification requirements and draft meaningful use provisions and came up with this neat color-coded version of the matrix. The largest gap is, not suprisingly, in reporting to Public Health agencies. I’m currently working on linking up EHRs to two registries and while the people on the registry side are great to work with, it is very much uncharted territory.
While the CCHIT letter reads almost like a brewing turf war (CCHIT has still not been named as the certifying body for meaningful use), the end conclusions is groups that are waiting for final meaningful use definitions before beginning the implementation process are going to be too late. The definitions are not due out until late 2009/early 2010, so groups will have limited time to get on their EMR AND qualify for meaningful use. Not to mention that the effective EHR implementers will long be taken.
What I find most interesting is that CCHIT goes one step farther and actually suggests not implementing meaningful use until 2013:
CCHIT recommends that meaningful use measures be either simplified for 2011, or postponed until 2013.
That’s an interesting suggestion, but is a stretch because the ARRA / HITECH legislation is specifically written around “meaningful users”. Are we admitting defeat already?
(Updated 7/13/09 – CCHIT updated their site; I updated the link to the ONC letter and matrix).
July 10th, 2009 at 7:34 am
[...] Article Ben, Implementing EHRs/EMRs, 10 July 2009 SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "CCHIT to ONC: “Hold Your Meaningful Use Horses”", url: "http://articles.icmcc.org/2009/07/10/cchit-to-onc-%e2%80%9chold-your-meaningful-use-horses%e2%80%9d/" }); [...]
July 10th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Problem with health care is that stretch goals get blown out of proportion and legislation DOES NOT seek the right input (they might think they do but come on….) most of the time before they make a decision.
CCHIT’s right, it’s tough but the flip side is if the goals are not set people with tread water as they have continually done for the next 20 years waiting for reimbursements to change before they do a thing. So while I admire the desire to establish goals that accelerate adoption using the ‘meaningful use’ criteria, ‘meaningless use’ and worse becomes the result because not many hospitals, nevermind physician practices ( http://www.ihealthbeat.org/Data-Points/2009/How-Long-Would-It-Take-Hospitals-To-Reach-100-CPOE-Adoption-if-They-Began-Today.aspx ) can make the 1st cut.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Ben,
Any chance you have a copy of the letter sent by CCHIT to the office of the National Coordinator? It seems to have been removed from the CCHIT website along with the matrix…Hmmmmmm.
Thanks!
Laura
July 13th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Thanks, EMRNurse! Looks like CCHIT updated their website over the weekend. I updated the links in the post.
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:54 pm
I think this might be the first and last time I agree with CCHIT;-)