Providers and patients should be comfortable that their Health IT systems are secure, confidential, play well with other systems and functional. To enable this, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act has appointed the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) as the certifying body that blesses each system before they will write checks.
ONC’s Health IT Policy Committee published a Meaningful Use data grid showing the minimum set of measures that an HHS-Certified EHR is supposed to report:
- % of diabetics under A1c control
- % hypertensive patients with BP under control
- % smokers offered smoking cessation counseling
- % patients with recorded BMI…
This grid is ten pages long and highlights many specific data elements the EMR needs to address to attest for Meaningful Use.
Attestation is painfully complex to understand and even more painful to prove compliance. I know of several programs where health systems spent significant time and money developing applications and procedures to qualify for one or more points of MU only to learn they need to spend months to become “certified” by ONC. Without this certification, CMS would not pay the incentives.
Health systems that prefer to build their own custom solutions need to analyze the cost- to build and certify as well as the opportunity cost- of the delays inherent in this approach. The MU clock is ticking. Each year lost results in greater financial losses.
IT managers who are chasing Meaningful Use need to understand ONC’s requirements and plan for this. Better yet, they can shop for systems that are already certified by the ONC. This is a build or buy decision and time is not on your side.
Pre-built, pre-certified solutions such as Health BI are very suitable answers to short-term problems. They can be installed immediately and are certified out of the box. They can be final or a temporary solution while getting a home grown solution certified. Pre-built, pre-certified solutions removes a giant risk.
What have you got to lose?
