Physicians are lining up against Meaningful Use.
In a detailed letter sent this week to CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner and National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, the American Medical Association presented a long list of ideas to make Meaningful Use better for doctors.
The AMA warned that “unless significant changes are made to the current program and future stages,” doctors will drop out of the meaningful use program, patients will suffer as existing EHRs fail to migrate data for coordinated care, thousands of doctors will incur financial penalties, and new delivery models requiring data will be jeopardized.”
All of which is true. But the AMA didn’t go far enough.
Meaningful use is well intentioned, but like a teacher who “teaches to the test,” the program has created a byzantine system that might pass the test of meaningful use stages, but is not producing meaningful results for patients and clinicians.
A formal study published in the April 2014 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine reveals there’s no correlation between quality of care and meaningful use adherence. This study validates what common sense has told many of us for the last few years.
Meaningful Use Stage 1 was a jump-start for EMR adoption in the industry. That’s a good thing, I suppose, although meaningful use also created a false economic demand for mediocre products. It’s time to put an end to the federal meaningful use program, eliminate the costly administrative overhead of meaningful use, remove the government subsidies that also create perverse incentives, and let “survival of the fittest” play a bigger part in the process.
Let the fruits of EMR utilization go to the organizations that commit, on their own and without government incentives, to maximizing the value of their EMR investments toward quality improvement, cost reduction, and clinical efficiency.
