The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT may include provisions in the next stages of meaningful use rules that cover the use of medical images, according to Government Health IT.
Currently, meaningful use guidelines only pertain to a practice’s use of electronic health records. These include patient histories and charts. However, there has been little consideration given to the use of medical imaging in all this.
This is starting to change. At a recent meeting of the Health IT Standards Committee, the news source reports that David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for Health IT, said “the role of imaging as a meaningful use aspect raises a number of important and interesting questions that I think we will be looking at tackling.”
He added that future iterations of the meaningful use rules could include provisions that discuss radiological and other diagnostic images. The ultimate goal could be to count all kinds of data the same, regardless of the form in which it comes.
The ONC work group is currently meeting to hammer out the details of the second stage of meaningful use, which are set to take effect in 2013.