Earlier this week, 51 healthcare groups wrote to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services asking for the current federal EHR adoption goals to be done “in a manner that will remove barriers to and promote the widespread adoption of health information technology.” This letter, sent on May 3, is an interesting backdrop for Wil Yu and Joshua Seidman’s participation in the Health 2.0 Show’s webinar on meaningful use today. It appears from the letter to CMS that the concern is not simply the adoption rules for EHRs but how these groups’ advanced HIT systems might or might not meet those requirements by 2011 and most importantly whether hospitals are eligible for the associated incentives. (The debate over ‘pushing’ adoption through institutions, as opposed to ‘pulling’ adoption through patient-centered approaches will be taken up in another post.)
Dr. Seidman started his Health 2.0 Show webinar with a similar comment to his other addresses to eHealth groups, “it is not about technology but about transforming healthcare.” He is right, and this is the heart of the meaningful use discussion. It is also a perspective that should inform our reaction to the letter to CMS from earlier this week. Slowing things down until 2017 or speeding them up will not matter unless we are approaching the problem in the right way. With over $200M in beacon grants announced this week, we must ask ourselves:
Are EHRs a data-source or a presentation layer? If we are simply replicating paper-based medical documents in electronic form, are we really advancing the state of the art? What parts of these data challenges should be handled in federal rules and which parts should be tackled by new open standards to re-architect the very plumbing of the Internet?
CLOUD is a non-profit technology standards consortia advocating, promoting and developing a language for people on the Internet. This language, like HTML, is not focused on any particular domain, health or otherwise. As a result, we are not advocating a specific approach to EHRs or final rules from ONC at HHS. Read the rest of this entry »
