by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | April 25, 2018
From the April 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Ranging wider in our interview, I asked his thoughts about meaningful use and whether the initiative has lived up to expectations. “Meaningful Use has achieved adoption of electronic healthcare records, but we lost the hearts and minds of clinicians along the way,” he stated.
Specifically, his feeling is that physicians have been presented with unwieldy layers of regulations, hampered by over-legislation without the aid of the needed tools. Or as he writes in his blog, “. . . we gave clinicians suboptimal cars, didn’t build roads and then blamed them for not driving.”
The result was a glut of issues with usability, workflow, innovation, interoperability and patient engagement. But it can be turned around by building off the lessons learned. First, according to Halamka, “requirements related o meaningful use and the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System introduced by CMS could be dramatically simplified to focus on interoperability and a streamlined set of outcome-oriented quality measures.”
The second step would be to refocus EHR certification exclusively on interoperability capabilities by setting up a public test server to track and report EHR vendor performance.
The third step would be to allow markets, rather than regulations to dictate the growth and push for interoperability. And the last step would be to offer a carrot to those choosing to adopt open industry application programming standards for interactions between providers, patients and payers.
Stepping away from science and indulging in fantasy for a moment, Halamka was asked to break out the crystal ball and offer his predictions as to where he sees U.S. healthcare in ten years’ time. “Value-based purchasing will persist regardless of politics - as a country we have no choice but to reduce healthcare costs to stay competitive in the world economy. More care will move to home settings, virtual visits, and lower cost community sites. Apps and cloud hosted tools will help us navigate to get the right care in the right place at the right time.”
And maybe with persistence and innovation and inspiration, we will make our healthcare system better, stronger, faster.
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