Meaningful Use

At a pivotal moment for healthcare, it's time to reform regulatory approaches, improve access to data for care coordination and establish a national patient ID, says John Halamka, MD, who offers some perspective to CMS and ONC on the future of MACRA, interoperability and more.  

While healthcare entities are waiting for EHR vendors to make data more interoperable, a raft of emerging technologies are enabling information exchange in ways that work effectively today, according to Lisa Moon, a partner with the Timmaron Group. 

John Halamka, MD, served the Bush administration for four years and the Obama administration for six. Change in Washington happens incrementally, he says: There is always an evolution, not a revolution, regardless of speechmaking hyperbole.

"As I've said many times, one of the great challenges we have is that the 2015 Edition final rule has an enormous scope extending beyond meaningful use with the notion that it can be coupled to every government healthcare IT program," writes John Halamka, MD.  

Starting in 2019, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, will change how they pay physicians in a profound way. Unfortunately, the details are complicated and confusing, and many of the particulars have yet to be worked out, which has led many healthcare leaders to glaze over the details and focus on more immediate concerns.

From population health management to meaningful use, cybersecurity to EHR usability, healthcare will face an array of challenges and opportunities over the next 12 months. Beth Israel Deaconess CIO John Halamka, MD, offers his predictions for 2016.

The latest video by doctor/rapper ZDoggMD may not win a Grammy, but it likely strikes a chord with clinicians frustrated by the inefficiencies of their EHRs, lack of interoperability, "meaningless abuse" and outdated technology.

With Stage 2 meaningful use, ICD-10, the HIPAA Omnibus Rule and the Affordable Care Act dominating the agenda these past few years, Beth Israel Deaconess CIO John Halamka, MD, is doing some research to help reshape next priorities.

Federal meaningful use requirements are well intentioned, but like a teacher who "teaches to the test," the federal meaningful use program created a very complicated system that might pass the test of meaningful use stages, but is not producing meaningful results for patients and clinicians.

Now that we have experience with two stages of meaningful use, it's also clear that a three year cycle is needed to ensure safe, high value, well adopted, introduction of new IT functionality.