Krames StayWell Blog

Stage 2 Meaningful Use, Patient Engagement, and You

  

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CSC recently published a fascinating report Moving Ahead with Stage 2 of Meaningful Use which reports on a survey they conducted of CIOs who are members of CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives).   Among the findings were that a high percentage of Hospitals and Eligible Providers that have attested for Stage 1 chose to defer on the meaningful requirements relating to coordinating care and engaging patients.

Within hospitals, only 41% met requirements for providing e-copies of discharge instructions, only 38% met requirements of providing patients with educational materials, and only 32% provided patient with e-copies of their information.    For Eligible providers, only 37% provide patient access to their electronic information.  In Stage 2, these optional menu set requirements will most likely become mandatory.   Additionally, proposed Hospitals and Eligible providers will need a mechanism to track that certain percentages of patients have actually accessed provided electronic information.

At Krames StayWell, our mission revolves around solutions for patient engagement – before, during, and after clinical encounters.  According to the CSC study organizational readiness and vendor product readiness were primary reasons for deferring some of these patient and family engagement requirements.  On our end, we strive to offer content solutions that can be integrated from within your health IT systems including Epic, Cerner, and Meditech but we also offer applications that can connect with your systems via 2-way HL7 interfaces.  We have also invested in utilizing the 3MM Healthcare Data Dictionary so our content carries metadata for over a dozen taxonomies including ICD-9, CPT, SNOMED, LOINC, and RxNorm meaning the heath record can trigger content with a level of specificity and sensitivity designed to encourage patient engagement that can add tremendous value to your patient portals.

Sometime in Q3 2012, we can expect to see the final rules for Stage 2.  We think we are heading in the right direction to support our customers but would love to hear about some of the challenges you are having surrounding patient and family engagement – from meaningful use perspective and beyond.  Please add you comments below.