The Stages Of Meaningful Use

A relatively new technology called electronic health records, or EHRs, has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by allowing all of an individual's caregivers access to any pertinent data regarding that patient's care.

As with any new technology, some doctors, clinics and even large to mid range hospitals are hesitating to implement it or even learn what is involved, because they feel that it would be a waste of time, and that the time and effort spent learning the new system would be better spent caring for their patients.

Medicare and Medicaid are strong proponents of the technology, and as such, they are offering incentives to encourage "meaningful use" of the technology by caregivers nationwide.

The word "meaningful" is important because not only do they want healthcare professionals to use the technology, they want it to be used effectively, and to achieve the goals they have set forth.

The expectations for meaningful use have been outlined by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and they have established deadlines for when and how they expect healthcare organizations to begin utilizing the new procedures.

The implementation of EHR usage has been broken down into three stages, which span the course of approximately six years, to ensure that organizations have adequate time to learn the technology, and that they are using it correctly.

There are different requirements for each stage and each one of these needs to followed to ensure that EHR is achieved and run through the clinic or hospital, and private physicians' offices have different requirements from major hospitals because of the discrepancy in staffing and number of patients.
The hope and the aim of the CMS is that the guidelines will be followed, the requirements will be met, and by 2016, healthcare professionals will be using the new technology to its full potential with competence in what they are doing.

The first stage is simply a question of quantity; the CMS wants doctors and hospitals to report how often the EHRs are being utilized, in terms of a percentage of patients.

The second stage requires doctors and caregivers to begin using the data contained in the EHRs when they diagnose and treat patients.

Perhaps the most important stage is the third, in which the CMS expects to give patients tools for self-management, and get caregivers to use the EHRs to identify when trends become national concerns, and improve overall population health.