Meaningful Use Stage 2 Saves Doctors’ Time

I recently saw an older document from an EHR vendor that outlined some reasons why a doctor should take part in meaningful use stage 2. They suggested that meaningful use stage 2 would save our healthcare system money, save doctors’ and hospitals’ time and save lives.

All of these are noble goals worthy of consideration. If meaningful use could achieve this triple aim, then I think every doctor and healthcare organization would happily hop on this new triple aim. Let’s look at each and see how meaningful use stage 2 is doing with this meaningful use stage 2 triple aim:

Save Our Healthcare System Money – This one is interesting because many of the doctors I talk to are afraid that this is exactly what’s going to happen with meaningful use stage 2. They’re deeply afraid that meaningful use is really a way for the government to get access to a physician’s data so that they can pay the physician less. You have to remember that if we save the healthcare system money that means that some organization is going to get paid less.

While I think that the fear these doctors portray is a little overstated, it is true that the government wants the data to be able to pay people using that data. One could argue that a doctor doing good work has nothing to fear and it’s only the crooks that are over billing for their services are the ones that have to worry. Although, we know that data isn’t perfect and there will be collateral damage. I would just argue that the government doesn’t know what to even do with the data right now. So, we won’t see this change happen in the near future. We’ll see if they can achieve this goal long term.

Save Doctors’ and Hospitals’ Time – This suggestion is so ridiculous that I had to make it the title of the post. What I think is possible is that EHR adoption can save an organization time, but I think we need to be careful substituting EHR adoption with meaningful use. Sure, the EHR incentive money has pushed EHR adoption forward, but any time savings that has come from EHR adoption has been lost to the meaningful use check boxes that are required.

Save Lives – Once again, with this one you have to balance the idea of EHR adoption against meaningful use adoption. However, I am hopeful that things like clinical decision support, ePrescribing (ie. legible prescriptions) and a myriad of other things can save some people’s lives. This is hard to quantify, track and measure and so I don’t think we really know. I think there are anecdotal stories of times where care was improved and even lives saved because of something in an EHR. Certainly there’s also some evidence that EHRs can make care worse. Although, I think that is usually just as anecdotal as the lives saved. For now, I’d say this is a bit of a wash, but long term I like the potential of what EHRs can do to save lives. Although, I’m not sure that MU will be the basis for the lives saved.

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.

6 Comments

  • The pay for performance issue is funny too. Take a PQRS too like GIQuIc; seems like a garbage in/garbage out, and even by honest omission (of cases w no path, where MD could easily and honestly forget to go back to submit data; if MD is ‘trying to save money’ (but not time!) by doing themselves rather than farming off to an employee, very easy to falsely inflate numbers….

  • I think you have this right in general.

    EHRs as document repositories viewable from anywhere have value.

    MU has been a time sink, a drain on productivity and a useless approach that has turned Doctors against EHRs. My Favorite “Meaningless Abuse” requirement is that an EHR must print a visit summary BUT the Visit Summary it prints does not need to contain a summary of the visit. Go figure.

    Get rid of meaningful use, take away government incentives and the control they come with, get the government out of the EHR “certifying” business and let EHRs flourish on their own merits. With that we might see some progress.

  • The entire Meaningful Use process has definitely not saved our doctors any time, and have had the opposite effect, being a giant sink-hole of effort to make sure we check all the right boxes to trigger proper recording of MU statistics inside our EHR so we can attest and get paid.

    In our case, the incentive is meaningful (will be about $200K for us this year) but the burden is fairly extreme. The spirit of MU is right, but the implementation is difficult.

    We’ve been “meaningfully using” HIT much longer than the incentive program life span, and were early adopters, building most of our own custom software stack to manage a 100% mobile primary care model for frail elderly and memory care patients residing in Assisted Living facilities.

    Our care model improves level of care for this population, and reduces overall cost of care for Medicare and other payers by a demonstrated average of $26,000 / yr per patient, or nearly $100 Million annually just for our current patients. Technology plays a big part, but most of the impact is made by simple improved communication between care team members.

  • Thanks for the thoughtful, rationale comments John Kraft. I think they’re reflected by many doctors I talk to each day.

    Would you say that the extra effort was worth the $200k? Will the effort be reduced over time as it becomes embedded in the workflow?

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories