Healthcare providers currently face a critical period when it comes to the adoption of electronic health records systems. Some organizations are already receiving incentive payments for achieving the first stage of meaningful use, while others are beginning to plan for the next phases.
Experts say that effective planning at this juncture is the key to meeting the current and future requirements of meaningful and getting the most out of the government's electronic health records incentive program. While this may seem like a daunting task, understanding the rules and finding technology vendors that satisfy all regulations can make it a simpler task.
This is the message of officials from Jefferson Regional Medical Center, one of the first healthcare organizations to achieve meaningful use and receive payments from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The group was notified that it achieved meaningful use on May 18, and has since received a total of $3 million in government funds. Moreover, officials said that they believe they could get as much as an additional $8 million from stages 2 and 3 of meaningful use.
While the group says that this marks a major accomplishment, they are already looking to improve their systems for future stages, an attitude toward electronic health records that has helped them get to where they are now.
Patrick Neece, the organization's chief information officer, told Healthcare IT News that they had to do a lot of work in preparation of stage 1 meaningful use. This made the attestation process a little more pain free.
This has also allowed the group's healthcare providers to use electronic health records to actually improve patient care. Satisfaction and outcomes have both improved through the meaningful use of the technology.
"All the technology projects here at JRMC are given a high priority, as they are a means for us to achieve patient safety, outcomes and quality," Neece told the news source. "We saw meeting meaningful use as a key initiative for all of the organization because we really realized the impact it could have, clinically, operationally and financially."
This type of forward-thinking attitude could help other healthcare organizations attain future stages of meaningful use. While stage 1 focused mostly on adopting electronic health records systems that met certain technical requirements, future phases may place a greater emphasis on using the technology to deliver specific patient outcomes.
For example, EHR Watch reports that the committee at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is considering inserting requirements in stage 2 of the meaningful use rules that would require healthcare providers to use the technology to get patients more involved in their own care and to make exchanging records a more central point.
Farzad Mostashari, the national coordinator for health IT, said that these rules would be a part of the growing focus within the healthcare community of putting the patient back at the center of care, which could improve efficiency and lower costs.
"We should make meaningful use the roadmap of what we need to do to succeed where increasingly care is going to be reimbursed based on quality, efficiency, coordination and safety rather than pure quantity," he said, according to the news source.
This type of electronic health records use could mark a major shift in the cultures of many healthcare organizations, which is precisely why they may benefit from starting their preparation for future stages of meaningful use today, rather than waiting for the new regulations to be upon them. Doing so could help providers land significant incentive payments down the road.