5 tips for hitting stage 2 meaningful use goals

5 TIPS FOR HITTING STAGE 2 MEANINGFUL USE GOALS

1GUIDE: 5 TIPS FOR HITTING STAGE 2 MEANINGFUL USE GOALS

Since program inception, more than $15.8 billion has been paid to Eligible Professionals (EPs), Eligible Hospitals, and Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Meaningful Use (MU) program. With the launch of Stage 2 of the MU program, compliance gets more challenging. It’s not just enough to attest to your use of EHR. Now it’s necessary to report levels of Meaningful Use, and demonstrate that you’re keeping up with program core objectives and menu objectives.

This handy guide will help you to make sure you hit your Meaningful Use objectives and make it easier for you to submit certified reports to CMS as required under program rules.

Introduction


Tip 1: Get workflows and communication right

If you build or deploy an EHR that doesn’t map to your clinicians’ needs and workflows, and if you don’t communicate openly and often, you won’t hit your adoption goals, and you’ll miss out on many of the bigger benefits that EHR can offer.

To get started right, identify and recruit key spokespeople and advocates among the clinical staff to act as liaisons and subject matter experts. Consult with them on a regular basis, to make sure you’re mapping to current workflows, and carefully, in cooperation with clinical staff, look for opportunities to improve:

Look for sources of inefficiency, delay or duplication of tasks so you can make work easier.

Look for costs that can be reduced. Are there costly paper processes and resources that can be eliminated such as exchanging supplies and postage for secured patient emails through a Patient Portal?

Can HIPAA compliant workflows be automated to address potential non-compliance and avoid associated, costly risks or liabilities?

Can technology alert clinicians at the point-of-care to outstanding preventive and chronic disease protocols so that quality is improved and costly downstream services such as emergency room visits can be eliminated?

Collaboratively building and configuring your system in close cooperation with clinicians will not only accelerate adoption, it will reduce costs and improve patient care.

Tip 2: Create a Standardized Data Architecture for disparate systems

Many healthcare providers are likely to have several separate legacy systems in place that generate and store data in disparate formats. These various data sources need to be standardized and integrated so that data can be exchanged transparently, and used to create reports and decision-support at the point of care.

To accomplish this, a set of standards must be established and enforced for data exchange. Specific pieces of clinical data need to be identified as being “important” (like medications, allergies, immunizations, demographics, and lab values), a standard format for import/export of these pieces of data needs to be required of all vendors (the CCD and CCR standards), and some data-interchange platforms need to be created where this standardized data can be uploaded to and downloaded from (regional Health Information Exchanges, or HIEs, and the National Health Information Network, or NHIN).


Tip 3: Track your progress toward Meaningful Use goals

If you don’t have a good system for measuring and tracking your progress toward Meaningful Use goals, you’ll be left guessing about where you stand, and scrambling to determine progress and verify it at reporting time. The last thing you want is to find out that you’re lagging behind program objectives when it’s too late to do anything to remedy the situation.

A Meaningful Use dashboard and reporting system can help tremendously in tracking compliance with core and menu set items. Real-time tracking offers immediate access to information without having to manually create reports.

Tip 4: Perform analysis to identify the key variables that impact performance

Many solutions store the detailed patient-level data behind each summary report, so you can analyze and validate the data behind each measure, including numerators, denominators and exclusions. Having the detail data available for analysis allows you to ensure that each measure is being accurately calculated based on your clinical workflow practices. During reporting periods, you can perform quality assurance on your meaningful use measures and patient data, so you’ll be confident when that your attestation is accurate.


Tip 5: Automate your compliance reporting

To qualify for payments, EPs, EHs, and CAHs are required to report on specified clinical quality measures (CQMs). Beginning in 2014, all EPs and EHs beyond their first year of meaningful use will be required to submit CQMs electronically. In order to report CQMs from an electronic health record (EHR), electronic specifications (e-specifications) must be developed for each CQM. The e-specifications include the data elements, logic and definitions for that measure in a Health Level Seven (HL7) standard known as the Health Quality Measures Format (HQMF) which represents a clinical quality measure as an electronic Extensible Markup Language (XML) document that can be captured or stored in the EHR so that the data can be sent or shared electronically.

If you’re using a single, certified EHR system, reporting may be fairly straight forward. But if your EHR system is developed in-house, or bridges multiple systems, you’ll need to put some effort into configuring and creating reports for submission to CMS. Packaged solutions exist which can easily combine inputs from multiple systems for easy, automated reporting.


Conclusion:

At its core, Meaningful Use is not about innovation or IT, but about the overall improvement of patient care. In this context, it’s exciting to consider that IT plays a huge role, not only in the success of EHRs and compliance, but in creating better outcomes for patients and providers. EHRs are a small, but vital part of a larger infrastructure that will assist health organizations to communicate medical information in a secure and timely manner. Meaningful Use incentives and compliance, reduced costs, and enhanced care are the major focus going forward into Stage 2.


DMI offers a pre-packaged analytical reporting solution, the MUMentor, that enables healthcare providers to monitor their compliance against the core 15 measures in real time. Our Meaningful Use dashboard includes a prebuilt data model and reporting that makes it easy to evaluate your progress toward program objectives, identify where the trouble spots are, and quickly remedy them before they impede your progress toward program goals.

The MUMentor incorporates a common set of operating technologies that can tie an entire healthcare organization together, automating long-running manual reporting and facilitating higher efficiency. The MUMentor allows for a single point of reference to a patient, clinician, payer, or other healthcare entity within a healthcare organization or across networks, and provides an all-inclusive platform for the standardization, matching, cleansing, and profiling of individual data silos, ensuring that data is capable of being retrieved regardless of how many systems reference it.

The result: a single source of truth for improved decision making and clinical performance across the organization.

With the MUMentor you can track compliance with core and menu set items, and you’ll be able to easily collect and report your Meaningful Use measures when it’s time to attest. In addition to Meaningful Use reporting, organizations are able to conduct other outcome measures for internal performance as well as operational efficiency.

Solution Benefits:Implement and Start Tracking- FAST!

Pre-defined back-end integration model speeds deployment

Low cost

Integrates seamlessly with any HIS system

Scalable and Fully Compliant process with up-to- date documentation and support

Track MU initiatives on a single dashboard

Track all MU events, compliance and action items from an intuitive user-friendly dashboard

Single version of truth with drill down capabilities

Get real-time status with automated integration with EHR systems

Enables a structured tracking system

Meet Stage 1 and 2 Objectives

Our solution lets you monitor, view and report on progress in each of the 24 objectives

Become eligible and receive your share of the $30B in government incentives!

DMI MUMentorTM


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5 tips for hitting stage 2 meaningful use goals

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