The recommendations, which will help determine who receives federal stimulus funding, have been revised from an initial draft.

By Chris Silva, AMNews

The Obama administration’s national health information technology coordinator has approved recommended definitions for what constitutes “meaningful use” of electronic health records, about a month after asking a key working group to revise its initial recommendations.

The green light from David Blumenthal, MD, means that the recommendations now will be sent to the Dept. of Health and Human Services, which by the end of the year must issue a rule with final definitions. Meaningful use is a key term that ultimately will determine which physicians and hospitals are eligible for billions in federal EHR money made available through the economic stimulus package approved earlier this year.

Recommendations from Dr. Blumenthal and the Health IT Policy Committee provide the first look at a policy framework for the development and adoption of a nationwide health information infrastructure. The committee said it received nearly 800 comments after unveiling a first draft of the recommendations June 16, though policy experts say few major changes were made since then.

“To say Dr. Blumenthal sent the working group back to the drawing board really is inaccurate,” said Erica Drazen. a managing partner in the health care group at Computer Sciences Corp., a technology firm in Waltham, Mass. “There weren’t really too many surprises or changes made from the initial draft. If anything, it’s slightly more aggressive.”

Drazen pointed out, for example, how the final recommendations specified that only 10% of all orders entered by an authorizing physician at a hospital must be made via computerized physician order entry. The initial draft did not provide an exact percentage. But the requirement for physician practices remains the same — they must use CPOE for all orders, according to the final version. Doctors also received several additional recommended standards to meet by 2011.

HHS must finalize EHR meaningful use guidelines by year’s end.

Some health care policy experts praised the quick work by Dr. Blumenthal, the committee and the working group.

“They have laid out these big, achievable goals that are central and critical, and the way meaningful use needs to be implemented is with an eye toward achieving these objectives,” said Carol Diamond, MD, managing director of the health program at the Markle Foundation, a health IT policy organization based in New York. Markle teamed up with two other health care policy organizations — the Center for American Progress and the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings — to comment on the working group’s report.

The organizations called the measures ambitious but achievable. Dr. Diamond cautioned, however, that HHS should not try to add new goals or tasks for physicians. “Rather than try to expand these even more and add more requirements, there’s a real opportunity for HHS to define within these goals how each specific provider group can achieve these measures.”

2011 objectives

Despite some revisions, most of the initial recommended requirements for physicians receiving EHR stimulus money remain the same. By 2011, physicians will be considered meaningful EHR users if the practice meets multiple objectives, including:

• Maintaining an active medication list.
• Incorporating lab test results into the EHR as structured data.
• Generating lists of patients by specific conditions to use for quality improvement, reduction of disparities and outreach.
• Reporting ambulatory quality measures to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
• Sending reminders to patients for preventive and follow-up care.
• Documenting a patient progress note for each encounter.

The Health IT Policy Committee also recommended objectives for 2013 and 2015.

The medical community has tracked the committee’s work and the meaningful-use debate with much interest, as the stimulus package provides approximately $19 billion in net Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentives for physicians, hospitals and others. The incentives begin as bonuses for early adopters but turn into penalties for those who don’t adopt quickly enough.

Meaningful users have been defined generally as physicians who have demonstrated to the government that they are using electronic prescribing and that their systems are connected to other entities in a way that provides for the exchange of health data to improve care quality. But the working group was asked to specify exactly what objectives and measures physicians would need to meet for stimulus incentives.

Health IT and policy experts say the recommendations approved by Dr. Blumenthal are a significant benchmark for physicians.

“This is a good time for physicians to check in, because the first wave of the draft was more about moving it out of the political process, and this development certainly moves it toward rule-making,” said Jana Skewes, president and CEO of SharedHealth, a provider of health information products and solutions based in Chattanooga, Tenn. “I would say now there are enough signs and pillars of requirements that physicians would be using their time wisely to determine what the requirements are.”

Skewes advised doctors who already have EHRs to check with their vendors to see if systems are up to date with the most current recommendations.

Now that the medical community has a pretty good idea of what to expect from the government, Drazen said, practices shouldn’t wait to start upgrading or adding EHRs.

“The market has been waiting, and people have been afraid to make investments, because they weren’t sure what was required,” she said. “But big capital investments shouldn’t have to be made to at least get started.”

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