NVISIA - Meaningful Use Update

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Meaningful Use Update - September 09

It has been an eventful spring and summer in the world of “meaningful use” after the ARRA and HITECH acts were announced in February. To catch you up to speed, recent developments include:

June 16 - HIT Policy Committee releases the “first draft” of their recommended definition of “meaningful use” of EHR’s.

July 16 - HIT Policy Committee accepted a revised “meaningful use” recommendation from its workgroup.

August 14 - HIT Policy Committee approved recommendations to the federal government on establishing a new process for certifying electronic health records as well as revised the “meaningful use” definition a third time. The latest Meaningful Use matrix can be found at this link.

Sept 24 (planned) - Certification Commission for Health IT (CCHIT) will release the details of its plan to offer a streamlined option for electronic health records certification meeting “meaningful use” criteria and will accept certification applications starting on Oct 7.

So all is clear to move forward with your EHR implementation, right? Well, it’s not so clear yet as the ONC is not expected to finalize meaningful use standards until next sometime next spring.

However, in an article on Government Health IT Website, CCHIT Chairmen Mark Leavitt states “Choose the risk you want to take - Go ahead now and have an extra year to implement, with a small risk that there will be some gap in which EHR systems would have to be updated to receive final certification.”

The choice you have is to implement now and get a jump on receiving reimbursement dollars but likely having to revise your EHR implementation to meet changing standards or wait until spring for the final standards but forgo a year of reimbursements.