Piccone will walk through how Wright State’s EHR/PPM from athenahealth aided in successfully attesting for Stage 1 electronic health records meaningful use. Many of the functions for complying with and documenting meaningful use were automated by the cloud system, while peers in other organizations with traditional server-based systems struggled to have the proper reporting tools, she says.
She’ll also explain how to deal with specialists who don’t think information from primary care physicians is important to their treatment of patients, and how to teach them why it is important to start collecting data for meaningful use to get the money that is available and avoid reduced payments in the future for non-compliance. It also is imperative to get older specialists to understand and accept meaningful use, and to show them how EHR tools can ease the task, because they might otherwise just retire, Piccone warns. “This is the kind of stuff they just go out the door with; they don’t want to deal with it.”
Another critical task is to ensure that all clinicians understand that meaningful use is a type of training ground for the time coming soon when the government stops paying on fee-for-service grounds and starts paying on quality alone, she adds. Education session 22, “Meaningful Use Attestation Using Integrated Cloud-Based EHR,” is scheduled at 11 a.m. on March 4.
What matters is whether the EHR vendor has their act together.