DrLyle's Take on the Meaningful Use Rules

I wrote up some notes about MU last week and the folks at HISTalk published it - here is the link to that posting (as well as some interesting comments from others):
DrLyle's Take on the Meaningful Use Rules 7/30/10

And here is the text from that post, with links to resources on the bottom:

In mid-July, the government released the final rules on MU and EHR certification. I was actually at the perfect place for this — the annual meeting of AMDIS (Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems). So we had 200 CMIO-type docs and a panel of speakers ready to talk about this topic. HIT geek heaven!

From my bias of focusing on ambulatory EMRs, here is what I learned at this meeting from listening and talking to some very smart people on the topic and reflecting on everything the past few weeks:

Big picture stuff
MU Rules are reasonable. The government listened to the end users and decreased the expectations on the "Core Rules" (decreased the percentage of eRx required), while putting other rules in an optional "Menu" (i.e. choose five of 10). But be aware, anything optional you don’t do in Phase 1 will be required in Phase 2 in 2013 (i.e. you’ll need to do 10/10 from the Menu)… and they will likely think of more things to add by then.

MU Rules are still not a slam dunk. Even for mature users, there will be work that needs to be done. It is hard to believe that a non-mature user, or users without a lot of resources, will be able to easily accommodate everything.

The government seems to think this will really work well and we will see over 50% adoption by 2015. I would love that, but am less optimistic. Best quote I have heard is that MU incentives are like giving someone money to have a baby. You will have a baby if you want a baby. The money is a nice extra, but not the main driver. Change is hard, so I am hoping that while we keep asking vendors and users to add functionality, we consider how we can improve usability at the same time.

I do hope the government is at least working on a secret Plan B in case 2015 comes and we are only at a fraction of where we need to be (e.g. maybe they give money to innovation think tanks to figure out better EMR user interfaces). If you want to read more about the rationale behind having a Plan B, check out the great Kuraitis/Kibbe blog on this topic.

Per John Glaser, we need to think about MU not as a simple, one-time incentive, but rather as a stepping stone to bigger reimbursement reform. In other words, it helps groups create the HIT foundation for alternative care models and payment reform of the future (e.g. Medical Homes, ACOs). In that future, an EMR is no longer a competitive differentiator, but rather how we use our EMRs will be the differentiator (e.g. care efficiency and improvement, use of clinical decision support, secondary use of data, and patient engagement).

Some details that popped out at me
1. The denominator is now "unique patients" rather than patient visits. So if a patient is seen three times in a year, you just have to fulfill the rule at least once for that patient.
2. Scoring will be done on an individual physician basis, not on a group-wide analysis.
3. To correctly measure many of these details (e.g. give clinical summary to 50% of those who ask) we would need to figure out a way to keep track of who "asks". That seems like a strange request for structured data and certainly should not be what a doctor is spending his time doing. So either we need to make it an easy administrative chore or consider doing it for 100% of people automatically.
4. For patient reminders (for patients over 65), physicians can decide content and format. For example, we can decide to just do colonoscopy reminders and only do it via mailers to patients — it does not have to be electronic. The point is to just prove we can identify patients by age and communicate with them in some way.
5. Patient education. We need to figure out a way to document when we provide these handouts. Some EMR systems may have that built in, but even then, just for the handouts they have. What if I go online and print something else out? Or give them a special handout I have created? We may need to create a special patient education section to document this, but it is again more busy work for physicians (which I am not a fan of!).
6. EMR vendors are on the hook. They are required to ensure some level of MU reporting from their EMRs to get certification. The result will likely be that they will be spending a lot of extra time and money preparing their EMRs and then trying to get everyone to take those upgrades. They will then likely just certify the most recent version of their system.
7. EMR users need to upgrade, due to above point. It is unclear how all current EMR users are going to be able to quickly upgrade their systems in the coming 6-12 months. That takes a lot of planning, time, resources, and money. I wonder if users of "older versions" will band together to try and get their older versions certified, or if the vendor will help at all?

Resources
• The NEJM summary from Dr. Blumenthal
• A summary from Computer Science Corporation (CSC)
•  Full text of the MU rule from HISTalk
*  MU PPT Slides from CMS
* The HHS FAQ about MU