Melissa Joubert offered this comment on a LinkedIn thread I was following that I found incredibly disturbing:
This and many other barriers currently exist. For example, some systems that claim to be certified for meaningful use simply don’t offer a fully integrated report module. I have seen cases where either the numbers are skewed, or there are no numbers showing at all even when a practice swears they are entering all necessary data.
Have you seen this happening as well? Have you seen certified EHR software that can’t report the proper meaningful use numbers? If this was widespread I’d think that we’d have heard more people complaining about it. What’s been your experience?
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For stage 1 – it was not a requirement of certification to be able to automatically calculate the measures and generate a report. Therefore, many systems do not support an automated report of the MU measures/numbers.
Even the systems that do may not support all the measures.
Some of the measures are just difficult to track, e.g., the electronic copy of health record measure – how would a system know when a patient “requested” a copy of the health information? You are basically forcing busy work on the practice at that point to record the request so that the system can automatically calculate the measure.
– JW
Wait for the Feds to move in. Fraudulent attestations. I know of many vendors and providers who simply lie on the report.
Audits are coming…..
Our Epic system (2010) currently cannot generate the reports. The Oracle stored procedure error’s out after running for 70+ hours.
Been trying to get tech support from Epic for 2 months, to no avail.
Oct 1 is looming and we have no reports.
Certified system – ya.
I have seen some that can and some that cannot. I have also worked with crafty report analysts with the ability to either mine the data or maybe even make it up. I can tell you that eClinical, Centricity, Vehracity, and Success EHS all stood out with the 122 providers that I helped with reports. I would rather not mention those with issues and I am sure they know they have problems and then need to fix them ASAP. It is difficult to achieve MU through Medicare without reports.
Thanks everyone for sharing. That’s amazing to hear Brian. I’m surprised that you have no response, but maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ll see if we can bring it to light. Sometimes when we do that, people finally start responding.
Lorenzo,
You know there’s this contact form where you can share the EHR with issues anonymously if you’d like: https://www.healthcareittoday.com//contact-us/
I was surprised to learn that some commonly used EHR systems being used to attest for MU allow for quality measure reporting to involve no more than clicking a check box that the measure was addressed. That is, there is no need to actually have any documentation in the record other than clicking a check box that adds a point to a numerator/denominator. Is this not going to be considered as fraud?
Dr. Oates,
I’m not sure ONC will want to have a bunch of fraud cases. I think there’s going to be a lot of what you describe though. Not all MU implementations are created equal.