HLC President on Meaningful Use Regulations
An organization of health industry chief executives today applauded federal regulators for being responsive to the concerns of hospitals and physicians in constructing the final “meaningful use” regulations that will determine the allocation of health information technology (HIT) incentive funds. But, said the president of the Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC), the newly-released rules leave some critical issues still unaddressed.
HLC president Mary R. Grealy said that, even though her organization was still analyzing the regulations, “it’s clear that federal regulators paid close attention to the more than 2,000 comments they received on the proposed rule, and that they have been responsive to concerns that the initial regulations placed the “meaningful use” bar so unrealistically high that the health technology revolution would have been slowed instead of accelerated.”
The “meaningful use” regulations establish standards that health providers must meet in order to qualify for a share of the more than $27 billion authorized by Congress in last year’s economic stimulus legislation.
The Healthcare Leadership Council is a coalition of chief executives from all sectors of American healthcare.
Ms. Grealy said, “An example of this responsiveness is seen in the fact that the rules no longer require that, in the initial stage of implementation, all of a health provider’s administrative transactions must be included in an electronic health record. That simply wasn’t realistic. Those requirements are now in Phase 2 of implementation, which is achievable.”
She said, though, that legitimate concerns remain. For example, the regulations should consider each campus of a multi-campus hospital system as a separate entity in qualifying for HIT incentive payments. And, she said, health providers who have built and succeeded with their own information technology systems should be grandfathered into the universe of successful “meaningful use” qualifiers, but that doesn’t appear to be the case based on an initial review of the rules released today.
Nonetheless, Ms. Grealy said, “we’re seeing important progress with these regulations. Clearly, the administration saw there was a gap between the theoretical standards they initially wanted to apply and the real-world challenges that physicians and hospitals face in achieving HIT advancement. We all want the benefits that come from information technology – enhanced patient safety, more cost-efficient operations, greater use of evidence-based medicine – but to make strides forward, regulators and providers need to be moving at a coordinated pace.”
