Dr. David Blumenthal, the new National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, has stressed that the goal of the ARRA/HITECH initiative is to improve patient care, not to mindlessly adopt health information technology. In this regard, he wrote that many CCHIT-certified EHRs “are neither user-friendly no designed to meet HITECH’s ambitious goal of improving quality and efficiency in the health care system.”
It is therefore disconcerting that the Association of Medical Directors of Information Technology (AMDIS) just weighed in on the issue of meaningful use with their letter to Dr. Blumenthal, recommending that the new national HIT Policy Committee use the 2008 CCHIT certification criteria to determine which hospitals and physicians get HITECH incentive dollars.
Even more disturbing is the AMDIS recommendation that meaningful adoption (their newly coined term) substitute for meaningful use until at least 2013.
We see placing the reporting of quality measures in advance of reporting measures of meaningful EHR adoption as akin to putting “the cart before the horse” — the fields that form the basis for automated quality reporting must first be populated on a regular basis . . .
What’s going on here? As I read it, AMDIS is acknowledging that CCHIT-certified EHR technology is so difficult for hospitals and physicians to use that it will take years of training before meaningful use can even be addressed. AMDIS states that process of EHR adoption and use must follow a ‘crawl-walk-jog-run’ progression requiring continuous cycles of training and practice that ‘cannot be skipped or shortened’ [italics mine] without risking failure, introducing errors, and causing the frustrated physicians to give up. More Here EMR