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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
Description

In 2010, as rules for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Electronic Heatlh Record (EHR) Incentive Programs (Meaningful Use)(1), were finalized, ISDS became aware of a trend towards new EHR systems capturing or sending emergency department (ED) chief complaint (CC) data as structured variables without including the free-text. This perceived shift in technology was occurring in the absence of consensus-based technical requirements for syndromic surveillance and survey data on the value of free-text CC to public health practice. On 1/31/11, ISDS, in collaboration with CDC BioSense, recommended a core set of data for public health syndromic surveillance (PHSS) to support public health's participation in Meaningful Use.

Objective

This study was conducted to better support a requirement for ED CC as free-text, by investigating the relationship between the unstructured, free-text form of CC data and its usefulness in public health practice. To better inform health IT standardization practices, specifically related to Meaningful Use, by describing how US public health agencies use unstructured, free-text EHR data to monitor, assess, investigate and manage issues of public health interest.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Under the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program Rule, hospitals are eligible to receive incentive payments from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services provided they meet certain requirements including Meaningful Use (MU). Demonstrating MU requires meeting a core and menu set of objectives including the capability to submit electronic syndromic surveillance, Electronic Lab Reporting (ELR), and immunization data in accordance with state law and practice. NH is building a NH Heath Information Exchange to serve all NH's MU needs including those of public health. This represents a huge opportunity for public health to collect more data to enhance disease detection and control, improve safety, and reduce health disparities, but also presents an integration challenge.

 

Objective

To describe steps used to build the required infrastructure to meet Public Health MU reporting requirements for electronic syndromic surveillance, ELR, and immunization data in NH Division of Public Health Services.

Submitted by elamb on