What is Meaningful Use

"Meaningful Use" is a term that was created by the legislature as they were creating the stimulus incentive. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) includes an incentive package for physicians to adopt information technology. In ARRA, there is a specific section called The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act that specifically references the following phrases in several places:

"...MEANINGFUL USE OF CERTIFIED EHR TECHNOLOGY"
"The eligible professional demonstrates…using certified EHR technology in a meaningful Manner"

What is EHR?

Electronic Health Record

What is an eligible professional?

This is defined by the law as a physician (as defined by the social security act - section r). However, only those that participate with Medicare or Medicaid have any mechanism to receive the incentives.

How do I demonstrate meaningful use?

Primarily, this breaks down into 3 main categories:

1. Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and ePrescribe
2. Interoperability with Health Information Exchanges (HIEs)
3. Reporting Measures

There are 28 requirements in all. In order to send the reports required in the Reporting Measures requirement, you must meet all 28 of those components. This includes things such as reporting on percentages of patients that were offered smoking cessation counseling, percentage of patients with diabetes under control, and percentage of patients with hypertension that have Blood Pressure under control.

While most of these requirements are specific to primary care physicians, all can be reported by specialists, and several do apply to specialists. Specialists may not be required to report on some items. However, the common theme is that providers must be fully implemented on certified EHR technology, and each provider must be using the product with most of the product features.

What is a certified EHR?

Essentially, this is an EHR/EMR (Electronic Medical Record) product that can meet the requirements of meaningful use. If the system is secure, meets the standards, and meets the feature set to demonstrate meaningful use, it can be certified. At this time, however, there is no certification process.

The Certification Commission for Health IT (CCHIT), an existing certifying body, has taken a proactive approach to provide a Preliminary ARRA Certification, based on the approved recommendations from the government. Final rules will come out, and CCHIT will then modify their criteria, and if necessary re-certify the preliminary certified vendors.

In short, an EHR such as ChartLogic EMR that can provide the infrastructure for security, interoperability, and the standard reporting criteria is required. Users must then use the appropriate feature set, including ordering and ePrescribe that is required.