Survey: CIO Confidence with MU Drops

A mid-November survey of health care CIOs finds those who expect their organization to qualify for meaningful use incentive payments by April 1, 2011, has fallen significantly compared with when the same question was asked in August.

In the August survey of members of the College for Health Information Management Executives, 28 percent of respondents expected to qualify by April. In the survey taken Nov. 8-22, only 15 percent of respondents were confident of making that timetable.

The confidence drop was far more pronounced at the community hospital level. Only 5 percent of those CIOs surveyed in November believed their organization would qualify by April compared with 23 percent just three months earlier. However, 42 percent of responding community hospital CIOs surveyed in November expected to accelerate plans to implement electronic health records, nearly double the 24 percent rate in August.

Other November survey results from 191 responding CIOs, most of who work at hospitals, include:

* The top concerns to meeting meaningful use objectives were implementing CPOE (29 percent), capturing and submitting quality measures (22 percent), vendor readiness (13 percent), I.T. staffing shortages (11 percent) and EHR certification (11 percent, down from 25 percent in August);

* Some 62 percent of respondents expect challenges meeting CPOE objectives with 52 percent saying the biggest challenge is getting physicians to enter orders into the CPOE system; and

* Questions remain about provisions of the meaningful use program with 38 percent of respondents uncertain about certain aspects, particularly Medicaid programs, clarification of objectives, specifics on funding and concerns of how long funding actually will be available.

The survey is available here.

--Joseph Goedert