Meaningful Use Goals Challenge Providers

As health-care providers struggle with the mechanics of achieving meaningful use of new electronic health records, the nation's health IT czar is urging them to not lose sight of the big goal.

In a message entitled "The Age of Meaningful Use," Dr. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health IT, suggests that the focus on securing financial incentives by demonstrating meaningful use of EHRs is just part of the story. "Even more," he says, "this new era creates opportunities to revolutionize the work of health professionals and health care institutions, and to make them and the health care system hugely more effective and efficient. "

The medical arena is significantly behind other economic sectors in transforming operations through IT, says Blumenthal, who announced this month that he will step down from his post later this year. While billing operations went electronic some time ago, the rest of the industry remained stubbornly paper-based.

The concept of meaningful use nonetheless represents "a vision for the evolving, dynamic and optimal uses of information to support health and health care improvement -- the tip of the spear for an information-powered leap in the quality, safety and effectiveness (including cost effectiveness) of our health care system," he says. Financial incentives represent "a device for encouraging development and innovation in the technology itself," he adds.

Medical information doesn't have to be static, says Blumenthal, and "meaningful use challenges us to imagine the way electronic information can 'take on life' and serve providers and patients in entirely new ways." Electronic information "can become dynamic, interacting with other information to (for example) generate useful safety alerts, call attention to treatment alternatives, enable instantaneous assessments of quality of care or outcomes for patients, or contribute to public health surveillance."

Blumenthal delivered his message Wednesday at a Healthcare Information Management Systems Society conference in Orlando, Fla. ONC also posted the message online at its website.