Healthcare Matters

There’s been a lot of talk –and scrambling—going on concerning “meaningful use” of Electronic Health Records (EHR). Well, the Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record program has paid $4.5 billion to 76,612 physicians and hospitals in incentive payments through March 2012.  How’s that for “meaningful?”

Here’s some more about the “incentive payments”:

• Of that amount, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) paid out $339.9 million for Medicare eligible providers, according to its latest data.
• 7,668 doctors received payments in January; 12,356 in February; 8,651 in March.
• 84 hospitals received payment incentives in February and 115 received them in March.
• To date, 225,765 providers in total have registered for the Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs, with 14,101 in March. The states that lead with the highest number of providers registered are California, followed by Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida and New York.

The following short list should save you a lot of consultant-speak. If you can digest the following 15 items with relative ease, then you should have no trouble securing a meaningful check:

• Use computerized physician order entry (CPOE);
• Implement drug-drug and drug-allergy interaction checks;
• Generate and transmit permissible prescriptions electronically;
• Record demographics;
• Maintain an up-to-date problem list of current and active diagnoses;
• Maintain active medication list;
• Maintain active medication allergy list;
• Record, chart changes in vital signs;
• Record smoking status for patients age 13 or older;
• Implement one clinical decision support rule;
• Report ambulatory clinical quality measures;
• Provide patients with an electronic copy of their health information, upon request;
• Provide clinical summaries for patients for each office visit;
• Demonstrate capability to exchange key clinical information;
• Protect electronic health information.

On behalf of the thousands of sales executives who have been making a solid case for EHRs over the last decade, I have to admit to being a bit chaffed –on their collective behalf.  The adoption rate for EHRs has been miserable –and the lack of a “standard” has echoed loudly as the primary reason.  Yeah, right.

—Tom Finn