Guest Post: The Meaningful Use Clock is Ticking

John’s Note: Much of this post will be child’s play for those of you reading the blog that are steeped in meaningful use, the HITECH act, EHR Certification, and the EHR stimulus money. However, I thought this guest post was a nice intro to the EHR stimulus money for a doctor or practice manager which was starting to learn. I’m all about helping doctors, so here it is.

90 days of data collection. This is what is required for year one meaningful use. This means by October 1 you better be collecting data…and hopefully you didn’t just start on October 1…that would be playing with fire.

What really is the purpose of Meaningful Use? In the grand scheme of things, the CMS wants to make sure that a practice hasn’t bundled together a spreadsheet and word processor, call it an EHR, and then try to claim a big reimbursement. So, sure, it makes sense that the CMS would have some requirements for your EHR.

As is the situation anytime you try and get money from the government, the list of requirements is lengthy, the red tape is plentiful and the maze continues to get more complex.

So is the case when “proving” meaningful use. Hopefully you aren’t of the idea that buying a Meaningful Use certified EHR makes you a Meaningful User.

Having an EHR with that “certification” stamped on the box is not like an Easy Button.

Selecting that EHR is the first big hurdle you have to conquer…now you have to show you are a Meaningful User.

The items of proof are shown here in this CMS summary [PDF]. What you’ll see is there are 15 Core Objectives you must be able to report on.

That shiny new EHR should have all of these reports built right in. You better try pulling some of those reports to make sure there is some data in them.

So, those 15 mandatory Core Objectives are already selected for you. Next, there are five more you must select from a gallery of ten.

Which objectives should you choose? Wait for it…IT DEPENDS.

Such the non-answer answer.

It does depend on a number of items, but really which five would you choose?

The easiest to gather? DING DING!

Why not?

Why make this craziness any more difficult than it needs to be.

We’ll go over the Menu Set Objectives, and which ones are the easiest for you to pull, in a future article.

John Brewer is the founder of HIPAAaudit.com. He and his team help physicians run HIPAA Compliant practices in the simplest, most pain free way.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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