I saw this a little late (which to me says something about the legislative process), but today’s the last day to provide feedback to the HIT Policy Committee’s Quality Measure Workgroup for Stage 2 and Stage 3 meaningful use. Here’s some information about it from this Health Care IT News article.

The tiger teams have already proposed measure concepts for each of the domain areas, Lansky said. After reviewing the teams’ recommendations, the workgroup revised and consolidated the measure concepts and now requests public comment on the proposed concepts.

Lansky said the workgroup is requesting general comments and specific examples of measures for each measure concept that fit the following criteria:

• HIT-sensitive – Capable of being built into electronic health record (EHR) systems with implementation of relevant health IT functions (e.g., clinical decision support) that result in improved outcomes and/or clinical performance
• Parsimonious – Applies across multiple types of providers, care settings and conditions
• Demonstrates preventable burden – Supports potential improvements in population health and reduces burden of illness
• Assesses health risk status and outcomes – Supports assessment of patient health risks that can be used for risk adjusting other measures, and assessing changes in outcomes, including general cross-cutting measures of risk status and functional status and condition-specific measures
• Longitudinal – Enables assessment of longitudinal, condition-specific, patient-focused episodes of care

Comments to the workgroup can be submitted online here.

Goverment Health IT summarized some of the discussion that happened today at the HIT policy committee meeting which focused on the challenge of applying meaningful use across all of the various specialty groups in healthcare. Here’s some excerpts from the article:

The Health IT Policy Committee today confronted the problem of how to craft a manageable set of requirements for the “meaningful use” of health IT across an industry where specialties and new practice variations are common – and where one policy may not fit all.

…

Those measures were geared for what is normally a patient’s first encounter with the health system: the primary care physician. But many specialists – who do not treat a wide range of diseases and conditions – may not be able to comply with all the current 2011 [meaningful use] requirements.

“Not all objectives and measures are appropriate for all eligible professionals,” said Paul Tang, vice chairman of the Committee and chief medical information officer at Palo Alto Foundation.

As a result, the committee must decide which of the 25 meaningful use measures should apply to specialists so they still can qualify for 2011 incentive payments – and which requirements to delay introducing til 2013 and 2015.

“I don’t think it was understood that we weren’t intending to have all the measures apply to all specialists,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator.

Unfortunately, I think this discussion has just begun and is going to get more complicated as we go. I know of a number of cases where the MU requirements just don’t make sense to a specialist. However, the challenge will be to have a set of requirements that aren’t so complex that it takes a specialist to be able to understand how the meaningful use requirements apply across the spectrum of doctors in healthcare.

What are your thoughts on how they should apply meaningful use effectively?

I like reading the weekly newsletters from XLEMR. Ryan Ricks has a way of making complex issues simple. This is a part of his recent newsletter.

Meaningful use has four main functional requirements: computerized order entry, drug interaction checking, maintaining an updated problem list, and generation of transmissible prescriptions. A certified EMR system must provide these functions, and physicians must use them daily for all their patients. In addition, a certified EMR must be capable of sharing information and working with other systems.

The HIT Committee wisely chose existing data standards for their recommendations. Health Level 7 (HL7) is data standard based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML). HL7 was developed for earlier government programs, such as the Doctors Office Quality Information Technology (DOQIT) and Physicians Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI).

For the full newsletter, go to: http://www.xlemr.com/b2evolution/blogs/index.php

What are your thoughts on the direction that the HIT committee is going?