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Meaningful Use

Description

There is an ancient African proverb that states, ‘If you want to travel fast, travel alone; if you want to travel far, travel together.’ This paper examines the issue of whether public health can and should ‘go it alone’ in efforts for creating linkages between clinical care systems and the public health sector, as part of meaningful use requirements. ‘Going it alone’ in this circumstances refers to whether public health should seek to require data flows, through meaningful use requirements, that meet its work flow needs but do not add value to clinical work flows. An alternative would be to look for synergies between public health goals and the goals of the clinical care system, which public health could exploit to achieve its ends through collaborative means.

Objective

The objective of this paper is to review the limitations of current approaches to linkage of public health through meaningful use reporting requirements and to explore alternatives based on integration of public health data reporting requirements, with clinical quality improvement reporting requirements.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) brought significant incentives to providers for implementing certified EHR technologies. It specifically requires utilization of certified electronic health records (EHRs) for electronic exchange of health information and for submission of clinical quality and other measures to the federal agencies. The most important barriers in the ELR implementation are a lack of funding at health departments, shortage of staff at health departments, and the variable content and format of ELR messages. The MU is a new factor that may foster ELR technologies through implementation incentives and through standardization of EHRs.

Objective

The objective of this presentation is to evaluate the potential impact of Stage 1 meaningful use (MU) health IT certification (MUC), on development of national electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) capacities.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

James Daniel, MPH, Public Health Coordinator from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), will be discussing the ONC's and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) for Meaningful Use Stage 2. Mr. Daniel will be giving an overview of the proposed rules that would specify the Stage 2 criteria that eligible professionals, eligible hospitals, and critical access hospitals must meet in order to qualify for Medicare and/or Medicaid electronic health record incentive payments.

Description

In the U.S., federal programs are accelerating the meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) technology and encouraging greater standardization in how governmental public health agencies (PHAs) establish surveillance data partnerships with healthcare providers. To qualify for the benefits of these federal programs (a.k.a., Meaningful Use), healthcare professionals and hospitals must determine: 1) Whether their jurisdictional PHA collects health data for immunization or cancer registries, reportable diseases, and/or syndromic surveillance; and 2) If the PHA does collect this data, then they must register for data on-boarding with the PHA and actively work with them to establish on-going data exchange. These requirements are predicated on participating state and local PHAs either establishing new or expanding the capacity of their existing public health data reporting services. To assist state and local PHAs in this effort, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) facilitates a national task force, known as the Stage 2 MU Public Health Reporting Requirements Task Force, which has recommended guidelines and clarified requirements for these new processes.

Objective

To exchange lessons learned and refine national guidelines for public health agencies to declare Meaningful Use readiness, register eligible professionals and hospitals for the public health meaningful use objectives, on-board data providers, and perform "on-going" data submission.

Submitted by elamb on

The Urgent Care Sub-Committee(UC) mission is to gather information about urgent care data surveillance and to provide urgent care onboarding support to jurisdictions performing syndromic surveillance. We encourage you to stay connected with this sub-committee.  Urgent Care Sub-Committee updates will be included in the Data Quality Committee monthly meetings. The Urgent Care Forum was developed for you to ask your onboarding questions and to reach out for assistance in Urgent Care onboarding.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 authorized the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to incentivize hospitals and physicians to become meaningful users of electronic health record (EHR) systems. In a final rule issued August 2012, CMS outlined the requirements for Stage 2 meaningful use to be effective in 2014 (1). The Stage 2 criteria require eligible hospitals to submit electronic laboratory reports to health departments. While many state health departments receive some portion of notifiable disease reports electronically, the final Stage 2 rule is likely to increase the volume of incoming electronic reports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are urging health departments to prepare for the sharp increase in electronic laboratory reporting (ELR). Crucial to preparedness is estimation of how many ELR reports can be expected. However, few health departments have experience with high volume ELR, making estimation difficult. The Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC), a regional health information exchange, has been processing high volumes of ELR for over a decade (2). To support health departments estimate potential ELR increases, the INPC examined its current volumes from hospitals with advanced EHR capabilities.

Objective:

To support health department estimation of future electronic laboratory report volumes from hospitals that achieve Stage 2 meaningful use.

 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

Early detection of new diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the subject of great interest (Gibbens et al., 2008). Understanding whether a disease is infectious or sporadic becomes essential for the application of control measures. Consistent and robust ways to the assessment of temporal trends are required to help in the elucidation of this question. Clustering of cases in space, or time and space, is also relevant in the understanding of the aetiology of a new disease. This paper presents a third approach: knowledge by comparison, either of diseases, surveillance sources or both. We applied this approach to the current debate about the nature of atypical scrapie, a fatal neurological animal disease, by comparing the spatial distribution of this form of scrapie with that of classical scrapie. A similar spatio-temporal distribution of these two diseases would indicate shared environmental disease determinants and help in the generation of hypotheses about the aetiology of atypical scrapie.

Submitted by elamb on