The Meaningful Use program is an electronic health record (EHR) incentive program initiated following the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that authorizes the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to award incentive payments to eligible professionals who demonstrate meaningful use of a certified EHR. The program has three stages, but incentives were only provided in Stage 1, which began in 2011. Stage 2 of Meaningful Use began this year and by 2015, eligible providers that have not adopted an EHR will face a financial penalty.

The AMA, headquartered in Chicago, is pressing for changes to the program after new analysis from CMS showed only 2 percent of physicians and less than 17 percent of hospitals have demonstrated Stage 2 Meaningful Use as of Sept. 30, the required reporting date for the 2014 fiscal year.

In response to the data, the AMA is urging policymakers to fix the program by adding more flexibility and shortening the reporting period to help physicians avoid penalties. Physicians representing the AMA also say that full interoperability is necessary to achieve the goals of EHRs — which are to facilitate coordination, increase efficiency and help improve the quality of care — but that is not widely available today.

"The AMA has been calling for policymakers to refocus the Meaningful Use program on interoperability for quite some time," said Dr. Steven J. Stack, AMA president-elect, in a statement. “The whole point of the Meaningful Use incentive program was to allow for the secure exchange of information across settings and providers and right now that type of sharing and coordination is not happening on a wide scale for reasons outside physicians’ control. Physicians want to improve the quality of care and usable, interoperable electronic health records are a pathway to achieving that goal.”

Although there are some systems on the market capable of interoperability, when data is transferred it is not always incorporated into the receiver’s EHR in a digestible way, making it difficult to act on and defeating the purpose of sharing, the AMA argues. Additionally, interoperability often comes at a price, which further hinders its use.

In addition to calling for EHRs to be more interoperable, physicians are also recommending that policymakers ease regulations to allow for EHRs to become more usable. To back its position, the AMA has been citing a 2013 report from AMA-RAND — a collaboration between the AMA and research firm RAND Corporation — that stated EHRs are a major source of dissatisfaction for physicians. The report found that physicians want to embrace technology, but they’re frustrated that regulatory requirements are forcing them to do clerical work and distracting them from paying close attention to their patients.

Physicians also raised concerns about interoperability in the study, saying that the inability of EHRs to "talk" to each other prevents the transmission of patient medical information when it is needed.

The AMA has provided the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and CMS with a blueprint for improving the Meaningful Use program as well as a framework that outlines eight priorities for more usable EHRs.
 

The post AMA Demands Meaningful Use Program Changes appeared first on HCO News.

The AMA said physicians are not happy with EHRs because the technology requires too much time-consuming data entry, leaving less time for patients, according to a study that the association did with the RAND Corporation in October 2013. Physicians that were surveyed expressed concern that current electronic health record technology interferes with face-to-face discussions with patients, requires physicians to spend too much time performing clerical work and degrades the accuracy of medical records by encouraging template-generated notes.

“Physician experiences documented by the AMA and RAND demonstrate that most electronic health record systems fail to support efficient and effective clinical work,” said Dr. Steven J. Stack, AMA president-elect, in a statement. “This has resulted in physicians feeling increasingly demoralized by technology that interferes with their ability to provide first-rate medical care to their patients.”

The AMA said that numerous other studies support these findings, including a recent survey by International Data Corporation that found 58 percent of ambulatory physicians were not satisfied with their EHR technology. Most office-based providers find themselves at lower productivity levels than before the implementation of their EHR and workflow, usability, productivity and vendor quality issues continue to drive dissatisfaction.

In response to physician concerns, the AMA released a framework that outlines eight priorities for improving EHR usability. The association would like to see EHRs that do the following:

• Enhance physicians’ ability to provide high-quality patient care
• Support team-based care
• Promote care coordination
• Offer product modularity and configurability
• Reduce cognitive workload
• Promote data liquidity
• Facilitate digital and mobile patient engagement
• Expedite user input into product design and post-implementation feedback

The AMA said that these priorities were developed with an external advisory committee comprised of practicing physicians, experts, researchers and executives in the field of health information technology.

In 2012, the Affordable Care Act began requiring health plans to switch to electronic health records, which would reduce paperwork and administrative burdens, cut costs, reduce medical errors and improve the quality of care, the Obama administration said.

However, the incentives that were intended to drive widespread EHR adoption have exacerbated and, in some instances, directly caused usability issues, the AMA argued. The association urged the federal government to acknowledge the challenges that physicians face and to abandon the all-or-nothing approach. The AMA is also demanded that federal certification criteria for EHRs need to allow vendors to better focus on the clinical needs of their physician customers.

The post AMA Wants Better EHR Technology appeared first on HCO News.