Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/41086
"The way the MyPractice Community training and implementation team worked with my staff was really wonderful. They helped us realize that to qualify for our 'meaningful use' attestation we really didn't have to make very many adjustments to our workfl ow at all. There were just a few modifi cations, and they were easy to do. When you see the technology you use, and the processes and standards you maintain in your practice as working hand-in-glove for the benefi t of your patients, then 'meaningful use' is easy to demonstrate." — Steven Takacs, DO Meaningful Use: It's How Quality Patient Care Happens It was probably inevitable, given the nature of the challenge, that so much attention settled on the specific tasks that comprise the "Core" and "Menu" items of the "Phase One, Meaningful Use" measures released by CMS last year.* But putting the check-list format in which the measures are commonly rendered aside for a moment, it might actually be difficult to imagine a nar- rative description of a contemporary medical practice environment that would not contain tools to support a provider's ability to accurately record a patient's demographics, reconcile all of a patient's medications, or maintain an up-to-date list of a patient's cur- rent and active diagnoses. And since any patient's medical history is a story written over time, usually by many different clinician authors, the first requirement Cleveland Clinic identified as critical for its health information technology solution also topped the list of priorities for the technology-enabled healthcare system envisioned by policy-makers for the nation as a whole: interoperability. "As a large organization, one of our first challenges was connecting every provider on a patient's care team, regardless of their physical location, to the information and functions they needed to deliver care of the highest possible quality," says C. Martin Harris, MD, an internal medicine physician and Cleveland Clinic's chief information officer. "So, from Steven Takacs, DO, (center) of the Newbury Family Practice in Newbury, Ohio, a "meaningful use"-compliant private physician practice. Also pictured, left to right, are Cheryl Goff and Laurie Gibby. 42 | Cleveland-Akron-Canton MD NEWS MDNEWS.COM SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2011