I’ve spent a lot of time reading about and thinking about meaningful use requirements for the EMR stimulus money. I’ve posted about an easy 12 page matrix for meaningful use, a list of 25 meaningful use objectives, and some thoughts on meaningful use.

What bothers me as I’ve thought about all I’ve read about the all important meaningful use is the lack of real practical guidelines and information about how doctors are going to be able to show that they are meaningful users of an EMR to CMS. What types of measures is CMS going to use to know if a doctor is a meaningful use? In what form will doctors need to report and prove this to CMS?

I guess at its core I’m missing the real practical details of meaningful use. It’s one thing to have nice lists of meaningful use objectives. Then, people can look them over and try and guess what CMS might do with those objectives, but it’s a very different thing to have details about what will really need to be done to meet those objectives.

Am I just missing these details somewhere? I try and stay reasonably connected to what’s happening and I haven’t seen any practical details. Maybe it’s still waiting for a government committee to figure out the matrix.