The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT, led by Dr. David Blumenthal (our keynote speaker at the ACC.10 Health IT Spotlight Session), released on Dec. 31 his proposed parallel regulatory schemes for implementing “meaningful use,” and for “certification of electronic health records.” In both of these documents (500 pages for meaningful use, and 126 pages for EHR certification) the ONC has articulated the national strategies and policies that the IT industry, the profession, hospitals and health insurers can expect soon. There’s a lot at stake here -- physicians who qualify as meaningful users with however this comes out will be eligible for up to $44,000 of federal support for health IT implementation over 4-5 years. To qualify, one must comply with meaningful use and buy and use an EHR that meets the federal standards.

The ‘meaningful use’ proposal is very heavily slanted toward primary care, and may not support many specialty practices, at least as crafted in draft one. That said, the ACC could very much benefit from these strategies as they evolve if we are nimble in shaping how they turn out, even though the first version of meaningful use is dizzyingly complicated.

There are some pretty radical recommendations in these documents. But maybe we need to blow up some of the status quo thinking on bringing medicine into the e-age. We’re going to put a lot of time and effort at ACC through our Health IT Committee to evaluate this all carefully and try to make both of these proposals better.

***Image from Flickr (Prasan Naik)***

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