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As we all know, the meaningful use requirements of the HITECH Act are designed to facilitate quality improvement, better care coordination and population health management.
However, it may not be widely known that physicians will typically need to use supplemental information technologies along with their EHRs to show meaningful use consistently over the next five years.
Addressing Quality Improvements and Managing Population Health
While EHRs are good at point-of-care interactions and decision support, physician practices and hospitals will need to acquire certain additional technologies to address quality improvement and manage population health. These may include electronic registries, multiple outreach and communications methods, software that can calculate the metrics required for quality reporting, and solutions that extend the reach of the provider and care team to help keep patients engaged in their care.
While the stage 2 and 3 requirements have yet to be drawn up, the final rule for stage 1 already shows that HHS remains on course to deploy meaningful use as a lever to get physicians to use EHRs for quality improvement and population health management.
Stage 1 Requirements
To meet stage 1 meaningful use requirements for population health management, supplemental technologies may be required. For example, the patient reminders in stage 1 require condition identification first and then gaps for the condition which is performed by the EMR technology. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of patients may need to be contacted. This can consume many hours of staff time, calling or mailing these individuals. Technology can take this same list and automatically generate phone call, email messages, and text messages, analyze the response rate and resend the message. This activity is continuously being performed in the background rather than a one-time action taken on a condition list and can provide reports to the team on a regular basis to track effectiveness.
Automatically Engage Patients
To meet meaningful use requirements during all stages, healthcare organizations and providers will be seeking the ability to generate lists of patients with specific chronic conditions or preventive-care needs, collect and report quality data, and generate condition-specific educational materials for patients. To do this manually would be a burden on care organizations. The solution lies in finding a way to automatically identify, engage, and track patients who need preventive and chronic care services.
What all of these methodologies have in common is that they automate the work of monitoring, educating and maintaining contact with the patient population that meaningful use will require. Especially at a time when primary-care providers are in short supply and stretched thin, it is essential to provide this level of automation so that the routine, repetitive work can be done in the background, rather than taking up the valuable time of doctors and nurses.
Information on the care gaps of specific patients should be automatically generated and provided to care coordinators and care managers within practices. These clinical staffers can then use this information to prepare doctors and nurses for patient visits. Between visits, they can use the population health improvement technology to make sure that patients get their needs addressed and come back for follow-ups. The technology solution does the heavy lifting, increasing care managers’ productivity and allowing practices to do more with fewer personnel.
To attest that a physician has gathered data on at least six of the 38 quality measures, practices will have to identify the numerator and the denominator on each metric. For example, if smoking cessation advice is the measure, an organization must be able to identify the number of smokers in the practice and what percentage of those patients received physician counseling.
Combining EHRs with Automated Approaches
By combining EHRs with these automated approaches, physicians can show meaningful use, qualify for medical home certification, obtain pay for performance incentives, and prepare themselves for the value-based reimbursement systems that are down the road. At the same time, these adjunctive technologies enable physicians to gather the quality data they will need to report to Medicare and private payers in an automated manner. And by giving care teams real-time data on the services that patients need when they’re in the office, these methods empower physicians and other clinicians to improve quality and engage in productive conversations with patients about how they can maintain or restore their health.
Conclusion
It’s clear that the meaningful use requirements of the HITECH Act can be met using EHR and supplemental technologies to keep patients engaged and coordinated in their care.
Learn More
Read a white paper about Meaningful Use and the Path to Population Health and Quality in a Transforming Healthcare System.