In the month of March,CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) had come up with a proposed regulation for MU Stage 3 program. Then in the month of April they had come up with a rule for program modifications valid from 2015 to 2017. This was immediately followed by industry feedback. Thereafter, all through the early summer months there was absolutely no stir on the MU front. But now that it is August when the final rules are expected to be published, all the health IT stakeholders have sprung back to action as a last resort to draw the attention of the feds so that their concerns are addressed.

Need for EMRs

We are aware of the fact that the healthcare existing currently in the USA is extremely expensive, despite that it is not able to provide top quality patient care or patient safety that should be attainable with this outlay. The belief that adopting the use of EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) would result in drastic improvements in cost, quality and also, safety issues is valid. However, you must not forget that the nations that demonstrate better outcomes at much less cost actually have not implemented the use of EMRs in such a big way as it is currently being done in the US.

The fact however, remains that there has been an improvement in outcomes post adoption and implementation of electronic medical records and majority of these improvements have been the offshoot of drastic improvement in the safety process relating to computerized e-prescribing systems and order entry. It is time you contacted expert meaningful use stage 2 consultants.

We need to consider three issues before coming to any conclusion regarding the efficacy of technology in enhancing the quality of healthcare in the USA.

What Are the Goals of the New Meaningful Use Rules?
The MU rules are aiming at enhancing safety and quality and incorporating the fact that one cannot improve if one cannot measure. In reality it is extremely difficult to define safety and quality. So measuring safety and quality seems like an uphill task. As such majority of the measurements are actually of proxies i.e. the processes that are said to enhance outcomes.

In the advanced world of today, the evidence that support these processes usually changes much faster than any change in rules. As such, electronic, medical records are actually being designed and developed for collecting data and information that is probably not pertinent by the time this information or data capture really is enabled.

Who Is Chalking Out the Rules?

Meaningful use rules have been conceived by a team of expert professionals who are dedicated, proficient, knowledgeable and possessing a very high IQ. They are known to pursue agendas as per their unique experience with and in the world of healthcare. The sad reality is that the formulators are not really representative of typical patients and are also, not busy healthcare providers with hectic schedules. While dealing with their physicians, most patients aspire for uninhibited communication and guaranteed privacy.

As things stand today, EMRs are somewhat coming in the way. As per recent studies, physicians are increasingly disappointed and thoroughly exasperated by EMRs that are currently nothing but data entry tools and not vehicles for recording patient information or communicating patient history.
Are the Rules Relevant to Present State of Technology?
Speech recognition and NLP (Natural Language Processing) for healthcare industry are the two technologies that have become matured now, but these advanced and relevant technologies have not yet been implemented to the extent desired. One must realize that physicians can utilize technologies or tools like speech recognition for telling patient story in a smooth narrative format. Now leave it to the NLP experts to extract relevant data from the clinician’s narrative. Now that these advanced and relevant technologies are available, it makes absolutely no sense for expecting clinicians to act as data-entry clerks.