Aug 24th, 2009 by Ben Meaningful Use Due Date: Mid 2010?
Last Thursday, Dr. Blumenthal announced that meaningful use will be finalized by mid or late Spring 2010. Turns out that often quoted December 31st date is actually for a draft, after which there will be 60 days for comments and then additional revisions.
Frustrated, I went back to the initial enabling legislation in ARRA and found the following requirement:
3004(b)(1) Not later than December 31, 2009, the Secretary shall… adopt an initial set of standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria…
I didn’t see any other language stating that the date could be pushed back. I follow the legislation pretty closely, but its certainly possible that additional legislation has been passed that extended the due date for the criteria. If so, please comment and let me know!
Regardless, pushing the date to late Spring 2010 means that the criteria might not be finalized until as late as June 20, 2010. That would provide 6 months for EHR vendors to finalize their development, receive certification, and bring their products to market. In that case, even the most agile, well funded vendors will have an impossible task before them.
As time progresses, it is continuing to look more and more like meaningful use will need to be incredibly simplistic, at least for 2011. This would be the minimum mentioned in our white paper on the stimulus and this previous blog post; a far cry from the draft definitions released back in June.
August 24th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I guess you could say that a draft document does meet the legislation requirement of “adopt an initial set of standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria.” I don’t expect too much will change after Dec 31.
However, what’s to keep HHS from ignoring the legislation? I guess they won’t get the money or something? I’m not sure about legislation and all this, but seems like HHS has whatever flexibility they want.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
[...] The sad part is that the practice didn’t know that nothing is final with meaningful use and may not be until middle of 2010 and so they were handing over their [...]
August 25th, 2009 at 6:59 am
What about the preliminary HHS Certification that CCHIT is supposed to be offering in October/November? Didn’t the HIT Policy Committee propose that the preliminary certification be good through at least the end of 2011? That would allow a physician practice to buy an EHR in the near term and qualify for the incentive payments starting in 2011. The practice would just have to make sure that it upgrades to a version of the EHR that meets the final HHS certification criteria by the end of 2011.
August 25th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Has ONC accepted the Policy Committee’s recommendation? It looks as if its been proposed by the Policy Committee, but not yet accepted by ONC.
If accepted by the ONC, this would move to help vendors who had received 2008 certification and, depending on what the ONC decides, possibly 2007 vendors. But there are many vendors out there who did not receive CCHIT certification, but are looking to become certified under meaningful use. They’d still have a tough hill to climb to receive either the interim certification or the full 2011 meaningful use certification.
August 31st, 2009 at 7:54 am
My sense is that ONC and CCHIT are working on a preliminary HHS certification right now. There were “minor gaps” and “major gaps” that needed to be addressed between the 2008 CCHIT Ambulatory certification and the HHS Certificatoin criteria. The minor gaps are generally things that were planned for 2009 CCHIT certificaiton and vendors should have the ability to accomodate. The major gaps are things that CCHIT has never considered (like practice managment software functionality), which would be hard to include in the preliminary HHS certification. I assume that CCHIT is going to explain how they are working things out with ONC on this town hall on Thursday. I think O7 certified vendors are going to have to go through the whole certification process. Either way, it should not take more than a day (does not include prep time) to go through the partial or the full certification process. I would much rather be one of the ten inpatient EHR vendors looking to get certified than one of the ~ 100 ambulatory EHR vendors looking to get certified.