Tag: Meaningful Use

2011 EHR Adoption Rates

Dec 2, 2011• 19

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

On Wednesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the results of its yearly survey on Electronic Health Records (EHR) adoption for office-based physicians. No surprises. Generally speaking, the majority of physicians in ambulatory practice are now using an EHR, and over half of surveyed doctors say that they intend to seek Meaningful Use incentives. The report is also presenting results broken down by state, so you can learn what folks are doing in your immediate vicinity. The more instructive exercise is to compare last year’s survey results [Fig. 1] to this year’s estimated EHR adoption numbers [Fig. 2].

Mr. Bush Goes to Washington

Nov 18, 2011• 15

By Jonathan Bush

You can’t believe the play that little athenahealth gets in Washington, DC… and thank goodness for it because no one has a clue about HIT.

How could they really?

I mean, there are 535 people in our federal legislature (give or take) and there are like a million different market spaces in the nation. This is why I have such a hard time with federal control of things. It’s impossible for them to know what’s going on…there are just not enough hours in the year.

As I’ve been thinking about care coordination and the complete lack of sustainable models or entrepreneurship in that space, it occurred to me that it’s currently not clear that it is legal for RECEIVERS of electronic health information to pay senders for the value of that health information. This means that the sender has no real motivation to send useful, relevant data in a timely manner (I know I’d pay the doc who sent me exactly what I needed about a patient more than I’d pay the doc who sends over a 30-page PDF) and that our industry will take a long time to understand the true health information exchange needs of providers.

I wanted to bring the concept with me to the Hill that Meaningful Use, in my opinion, is use that is meaningful to a medical care provider in the actual doing of business. In a space with such clear demand, we’ve got to let innovators develop a way to supply information that the market (providers of care) needs, if we want to improve outcomes and reduce costs.

So I flew down to Washington and it was tons of fun… me and Lauren Fifield and the lobbyist and a full dance card on Capitol Hill.

First, we met with Sally Canfield, policy director for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

She’s a true health policy veteran who likes getting—and will give you—the straight story. She’s also one of the only people on the Hill with whom I could speak at my normal (lightning) pace and know she can keep up. We talked about everything from the potential fall of hospitals (Need a hospital? Just scan the horizon for a construction crane)…to the alarming rate of physician employment…to making Meaningful Use really meaningful…to encouraging care coordination…to life in the cloud.

What Keeps Me Up at Night

Oct 31, 2011• 3

By John Halamka, MD

Every year I write about the projects and trends which keep me up at night. Here’s my list for FY12:

1. Workforce recruitment/retention – $27 billion in stimulus funds from HITECH have increased demand for experienced IT staff to implement and support electronic health records. In many ways, it’s a mini “dot com” boom for healthcare IT experts. This makes recruiting and retaining qualified staff even harder. Tomorrow, I’m meeting with a consulting team to formulate an FY12 workforce strategy.

2. 5010/ICD10 – 5010 describes a set of X12 standards used for administrative transactions (benefits/authorization. referral authorization, claims). Payers and providers must support 5010 by January 1, 2012 or risk disruption of the revenue cycle. BIDMC completed all its 5010 work and is now in final testing with every payer. Most payer and provider stakeholders will meet the deadline, but significant resources have been pulled from other projects. ICD-10 implementation is required by October 1, 2013 and I’ve written about those challenges. Billions will be spent, many healthcare IT projects will be deferred for the next 2 years, and the end result will be no cost savings (coding costs are likely to increase 50%), no quality improvement, no increased safety, and no efficiency gains. If we complete the ICD-10 project on time, no one will notice, but customers will all be angry at the IT department (and the CIO) for the work on other projects that was deferred.

3. Vendor Product Quality – over the past year, I’ve had several bad experiences with infrastructure and application vendors which delivered products that did not have the reliability, security, or performance promised. Why?

* the pace of innovation is so fast, that time for quality assurance is diminished

* the economy has stressed companies and they are focused on making as many sales as fast as they can while controlling development and support costs

* the end result is less satisfied customers

Meaningful Use Requires Meaningless Data

Aug 23, 2011• 21

By DINOSAUR, MD

Race is a medically meaningless concept.

Spare me the few tired cliches about prostate cancer, diabetes, and sarcoidosis being more common in blacks than whites, or even the slightly increased risk of ACEI cough in patients of Asian descent. We screen Jews of Ashkenazi descent for Tay Sachs without any racial labeling. All that information is readily accessible under the Family History section of the medical history. It is no more than custom which dictates the standard introductory format including age, race, and gender. It turns out I’ve blogged about this before at some length (pretty good post, actually). What is new is the advent of electronic medical records.

Much hullabaloo has been made about federal stimulus funds allocated to doctors as payments for adopting EMRs; “up to $44,000!” Here’s the problem with that figure, though, including how it breaks down (source here):

[M]aintaining [an EMR] costs multiple thousands of dollars a year. Bear in mind that they’re not talking about a lump sum payment of $44,000. It’s $18,000 the first year, $12,000 the second year, $8000 the next, $4000 the next, and then $2000, for a total of $44,000 spread over five years. FOR A SYSTEM EXPECTED TO COST AN AVERAGE OF $10,000 PER DOCTOR PER YEAR, not counting the start up costs, which run in the vicinity of $50,000. $44,000 over five years for something that will cost us $90,000 over the same period? And that’s even if they actually get around to giving out the money in the first place! According to this, in order to qualify for “meaningful use,” EMRs must be used for ePrescribing, for communicating with other EMRs like labs and hospitals, and for transmitting information on performance measures (the paternalistic proxy for “quality”) to the government.

Fulfilling the PROMISe

Jun 20, 2011• 1

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

A brand new EMR is being rolled out in a midsize hospital. The EMR is exclusively based on touchscreen technology, with devices strategically placed on the floor. It provides concurrent access to medical records for all team members (physicians, nurses, pharmacists, radiologists, dieticians, secretaries) wherever they may be. Patients are also accessing the EMR. They enter their own histories and describe symptoms in detail through the same touchscreen devices. This patient-centered EMR, built by a team of clinicians and technologists working together, is taking a huge step forward in Clinical Decision Support (CDS). Physicians are not only shown differential diagnoses based on what patients and other team members entered into the system, but are also presented with individualized care plans, possible side effects, dosage recommendations and drug-drug-interaction alerts, all referencing evidence available in medical literature. Longitudinal records, test results and narratives are available by problem and by patient, and the response time is never more than half a second between the thousands of screens available. The place is Vermont, and the year is 1970.

Half a century ago, when work on this EMR was taking place, Healthcare IT was on the cutting edge of technology. The Problem Oriented Medical Information System (PROMIS), the brainchild of Dr. Lawrence Weed, was pushing the envelope on every technology from hardware to operating systems, to network communications, database design and programming languages. By the time this government funded project was finally shut down, the PROMIS team dealt with such issues as mass storage, federated or single database, high availability, human interface design and networking between geographically dispersed locations. It will take several decades for the rest of the world to catch up with Dr. Weed’s, now defunct, innovation and produce something like IBM’s Watson software package, which is yet to be adapted and tested in health care. Somewhere, somehow, we took a wrong turn in Healthcare IT, and it wasn’t the much maligned billing influence, since PROMIS from day one, attempted to integrate billing in its software, with no ill effects.

Five Things EHR Vendors Should Do Right Now

Jun 15, 2011• 1

By SHAHID N. SHAH

Last week I was invited to attend the second annual NIST forum for EHR Usability called “A Community-Building Workshop: Measuring, Evaluating and Improving the Usability of Electronic Health Records.” NIST, in collaboration with the ONC, unveiled its initial discussion points for what it might consider as the “Usability Criteria” in the upcoming Meaningful Use Stage 2 regulations. At the event I met with Dr. Melanie Rodney, Distinguished Researcher at Macadamian and a member of the HIMSS Usability task force; I was impressed by the work that she and her firm were doing in EHR usability space. At the NIST forum I was able to spend time with experts in the both the fields of EHRs (like me) as well as in usability and user experience (like Melanie). We learned that the government believes that while usability can be key in increasing product effectiveness, speed, enjoyment, etc., NIST is going to focus on EHR usability for the improvement of patient safety. I asked Melanie and Lorraine Chapman, Director of User Research at Macadmian, to share with us what we in the EHR technical community should do in light of what we learned at the NIST forum last week. Here’s what Melanie and Lorraine said:

While the specifics are still forthcoming, vendors have a window of opportunity today to get ahead of NIST – and ahead of competitors – by proactively addressing meaningful use in advance of the 2013 deadline. Let’s look at what vendors can do, combining the information NIST has given so far with fundamental usability best practices:

Step 1: Set Usability Goals related to Patient Safety

These are specific, measurable goals such as “Our EHR must provide a 99% error-free rate of medication entry”. NIST has given the following examples of use error categories, each of which might be driving 1 or more goals.

patient ID errors
mode errors [e.g., dose related]
data accuracy errors
visibility errors [e.g., tapered dose 80-20mg – 80 shows vs. 20]
consistency errors [ e.g., pounds vs. kilos ]
recall errors [e.g., 1 time dose]
feedback errors [1 tablet vs. 1/4 tablet]
data integrity errors [ next vs. finish to enter injection just administered]

Fostering Innovation in Healthcare IT

Apr 18, 2011

By JOHN MOORE

As in most sectors, innovation in healthcare IT (HIT) is by and large incremental. A tweak here and added feature there to some existing application, e.g., what we are seeing today from EHR vendors as they strive to meet meaningful use criteria. Occasionally, we may see a vendor develop something new and novel – one might put porting their EHR application onto an iPad as an example of such – but really, is that innovation or just an attempt to meet existing customer needs by tweaking software to meet the design criteria of a new form factor?

Innovation, true innovation that breaks from existing norms is exceedingly rare. Even in an industry sector such as HIT where we are seeing an unprecedented amount of money being spent, it has been difficult for this analyst firm to find real innovation that gets us excited and thinking beyond the limited constructs that seem to keep this industry perpetually incased, like an insect, in amber. Part of the reason lies with tradition (culture), another part with entrenched interests (existing/legacy IT vendors) and arguably the most important business models.

But that may begin to change as nothing elicits innovation more than a substantial change to core models of doing business. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released proposed rules for the establishment of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), which is a move towards bundled payments. Here in Massachusetts, the Governor announced introduced a bill as well to “expand the use of alternative payments and significantly reduce fee-for-service payments by end of 2015.” It is actions such as these that will open the floodgates ushering in some truly innovative approaches to optimizing the delivery of quality care.Continue reading…

Not So Fast – Why It Pays to Wait Until FY 2012 on Meaningful Use

Mar 15, 2011• 18

By PROTIMA ADVANI

The registration process and reporting period for the meaningful use incentive program officially commenced on Jan. 3. More than 21,000 health care providers have registered to date and many more are ramping up efforts to meet meaningful use criteria and collect federal incentives in fiscal year 2011. However, rushing out the gates in FY 2011 is extremely risky and not advisable. In fact, the Advisory Board Company strongly recommends waiting until FY 2012 to first demonstrate meaningful use.

Three key reasons hospitals should wait until FY 2012 are outlined below.

Compressed, unreasonable timeline for achieving Stage 2: The final rule states hospitals that first demonstrate meaningful use in FY 2011 will need to achieve Stage 2 by FY 2013 (i.e. Oct. 1, 2012). Furthermore, hospitals must demonstrate meaningful use requirements for the entire year in Stage 2 as opposed to the 90-day reporting period for the first year that a hospital is a meaningful user. Unfortunately, the final rule defining Stage 2 requirements will not be finalized until mid-2012, leaving hospitals that first demonstrate meaningful use in 2011 with less than six months to meet Stage 2 by Oct. 1, 2012. This will be an unattainable leap for health care providers, especially because Stage 2 is being positioned as a step down from Stage 3, not a step up from Stage 1. Stage 2 comprises enhancements to Stage 1 requirements in addition to a host of new, more complex criteria and clinical quality measures. Furthermore, hospitals will be dependent on their vendors’ ability to rapidly develop, test and seek certification for the Stage 2 EHR capabilities, adding another barrier to provider Stage 2 meaningful use achievement in the short time frame available. In contrast, waiting until FY 2012 to first demonstrate meaningful use will afford hospitals nearly 18 months to migrate from Stage 1 to Stage 2 — a more adequate time frame to acquire, implement and adopt the required capabilities for Stage 2.Continue reading…

A Speed Bump on the Road to Meaningful Use

Mar 14, 2011• 7

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

Meaningful Use has hit a speed bump. It’s of the low, wide and gentle type, not the old raggedy, narrow and mean bump you find in older parking lots. Now that a tentative proposal for Meaningful Use Stage 2 has been published by ONC, and duly commented upon by the public, it just dawned on folks that there isn’t enough lead time between Stage 1 and Stage 2 to allow for an orderly transition, and here is the problem in a nutshell.

Meaningful Use is divided into three, increasingly more demanding, stages, starting in 2011 with Stage 1 and advancing every two years to a higher Stage. So 2013 marks the beginning of Stage2 and 2015 is the start of Stage 3. It seems that ONC and CMS need about a year and a half to define each Stage from start to finish, so if they start working on Stage 2 right after Stage 1 commences, there are only 6 months left for NIST to define certification criteria, EHR vendors to update their wares and certify them, and physician and hospitals to roll the new and improved products out. Oops……

The hand wringing in “industry experts’” circles began immediately after this realization, culminating with an Advisory Board publication advising hospitals in particular to not apply for Meaningful Use incentives in 2011, but instead wait for 2012, which they can do without penalty, and the same advice is applied to ambulatory practices owned by hospitals. They did not recommend anything for physicians in private practice. Continue reading…

Freeing the Data

Mar 2, 2011• 3

By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

I’m keynoting this year’s Intersystems Global Conference on the topic of “Freeing the Data” from the transactional systems we use today such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Electronic Health Records (EHR), etc. As I’ve prepared my speech, I’ve given a lot of thought to the evolving data needs we have in our enterprises.

In healthcare and in many other industries, it’s increasingly common for users to ask IT for tools and resources to look beyond the data we enter during the course of our daily work. For one patient, I know the diagnosis, but what treatments were given to the last 1000 similar patients. I know the sales today, but how do they vary over the week, the month, and the year? Can I predict future resource needs before they happen?

In the past, such analysis typically relied on structured data, exported from transactional systems into data marts using Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) utilities, followed by analysis with Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) or Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

In a world filled with highly scalable web search engines, increasingly capable natural language processing technologies, and practical examples of artificial intelligence/pattern recognition (think of IBM’s Jeopardy-savvy Watson as a sophisticated data mining tool), there are novel approaches to freeing the data that go beyond a single database with pre-defined hypercube rollups. Here are my top 10 trends to watch as we increasingly free data from transactional systems.Continue reading…