MDNews - Greater Kansas

providers who have begun the attestation process indicate the fi rst steps are the most diffi cult. According to Shahid N. Shah, CEO of Netspective and blogger at HealthcareGuy.com, who has more than 35 years of experience in the information technology field, understanding the goals, costs and logistics of achieving meaningful use up front will save eligible hospitals and providers time and money in the long run. Although achieving meaningful I use qualifies providers for incentives from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Shah stresses that providers must remember the ultimate goal is to improve clinical care. As noted in the report "Meaningful Use: Lessons Learned on the Path to EHR Excellence in Ambulatory Care," inter- viewees — all of whom had received the Nicholas E. Davies Award of Excellence from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society — viewed federal incentives as "rewards" for improvements they should be making anyway. POWER USER PLAYBOOK A. Maintain a clinical perspective of meaningful use. B. Consider your practice's unique needs before selecting an EHR vendor and identify workfl ow adjustments needed to meet meaningful use data requirements. C. Evaluate your current technology and invest in necessary upgrades to ensure your EHR system operates effi ciently. D. Installing the EHR system is only part of the challenge. Assess your data population needs and plan accordingly. E. Map out staff training objectives in detail. Seemingly simple details such as data entry uniformity are essential to effectively using the EHR once it is installed. MPLEMENTING AN ELECTRONIC health record (EHR) system requires tremendous evaluation and plan- ning — perhaps the reasons many CALLING ON AT&T AT&T HAS PARTNERED with Baylor Health Care System to unite a far-reaching health care network of 4,000 providers and more than 250 patient access points with one central platform. The AT&T Healthcare Community Online focuses on eliminating unnecessary administrative work and improving the quality of health care by linking physicians across distance and medical fi elds. Not only will Baylor Health Care physi- cians have access to every patient record in the Texas system, but providers will also have communication, evidence-based analysis and practice management functions on hand in their offi ces. Taking the online community one step further, a relationship with the American Medical Association (AMA) has resulted in the launch of a combined care management platform consisting of the AMA's AMAGINE physician portal and the AT&T Healthcare Community Online. AMAGINE offers physicians a Web-based home for health informa- tion technology products related to clinical decision support, e-prescribing, patient registries and revenue cycle management, while the AT&T vehicle supplies additional infrastructure support. The dual platform enhances the environment for collaborative care and physicians' ability to apply meaningful use principles to their daily practices. "Providers need to realize they should go into EHRs and meaningful use because their businesses and patients will demonstrably benefit from the purchase," Shah says. "The incentives the government is giving out should be seen as a way of partial payment for the EHR investment." In addition to understanding the goals of meaningful use, Shah explains that evaluation of information technology infrastructure and associated costs is paramount to selecting the proper EHR system. Investments are often required to update these technologies and should be considered part of the overall EHR system cost. "Before you can purchase an EHR system, you need good power, good connectivity (Internet), good networking (internal), good computers and good software to support the system," he says. Another facet of successful EHR implementation is planning for data population of the system and workfl ow adjustments that will be necessary to use EHRs effi ciently. This includes proper staff training in areas such as data entry, network navigation and workstation processes, among others. Building on the Foundation According to Shah, each new stage of attestation will expand upon the preced- ing ones. Accordingly, providers working toward achieving Stage 2 of meaningful use may have more work to do. A report by the Global Institute for Emerging Healthcare Practices, "Moving Ahead With Stage 2 of Meaningful Use," notes that 62% of eligible hospitals that attested to Stage 1 of meaningful use in 2011 deferred the menu objective of utilizing EHRs to identify and provide patient-specifi c educational resources. This measure is part of the mandatory core objectives for attesting to Stage 2 meaningful use, and will likely reappear as part of Stage 3 measures. Another Stage 1 optional criterion, medication reconciliation, is a requirement of Stage 2 meaningful use. "Stage 1 of meaningful use was mostly about setting the bare minimum EHR functional requirements and pegging a 'fl oor' for data capture; it had many required elements and a few optional elements for care providers to utilize," says Shah. "The proposed Stage 2 criteria is primarily focused on increasing structured electronic capture of health information and fostering data exchange at points of care transition by turning most of the optional items from Stage 1 into required elements." ■ onc-chpl.force.com/ehrcert. For a list of certifi ed EHR products, visit MDNEWS.COM ■ MD NEWS Greater Kansas | 17

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