Meaningful Use

While the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act is primarily designed to accelerate electronic health record (EHR) adoption, its Meaningful Use rules turn government incentives into a vehicle for launching transformational healthcare initiatives that will:

• Expand access to care
• Improve the quality of care
• Reduce cost growth to a sustainable level

In essence, the Meaningful Use requirements are designed to steer healthcare toward population health management.

Beyond EHRs

To achieve meaningful use consistently over the five years of the incentives and to advance toward quality and population health management, practices will be turning to implement supplemental technologies in conjunction with their EHRs.

These may include:

• Electronic registries
• Multiple outreach and communications methods
• Software that can calculate the metrics required for quality reporting

What all of these methodologies have in common is that they automate the work of monitoring, educating and maintaining contact with the patient population. At a time when primary-care providers are in short supply and stretched thin, this automation performs routine, repetitive work in the background, freeing doctors and nurses to focus on providing quality care.

By combining EHRs with these automated approaches, physicians can show meaningful use, qualify for medical home certification, obtain pay for performance incentives and prepare themselves for the value-based reimbursement systems that are down the road.

By giving care teams real-time data on the services that patients need when they’re in the office, these methods empower physicians and other clinicians to improve quality and engage in productive conversations with patients about how they can maintain or restore their health.