During last week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said,

“In 2016, meaningful use as it has existed – with MACRA – will now be effectively over and replaced with something better.”

Andy’s complete comments at http://medgroup.biz/Slavin

The big question: What does “better” look like because, according to most hospitalists, it can’t get much worse.

It’s been a slow road. Meaningful use was introduced in 2009 with seven stages – see http://bit.ly/7-MUstages – and we’re not out of stage two yet.

In fact, President Obama signed a “Meaningful Use hardship exemption bill” into law just three weeks ago. And the American Hospital Association (AHA) wants to delay Stage 3 until at least 2019 and only after 75 percent of eligible professionals and eligible hospitals have met the requirements of Stage 2 of the program.

For today’s discussion, has the push toward electronic medical records affected your business? How?

What will have to happen for the promise of a digital health future to become a reality?

For more on these concepts:
Meaningful Use: http://bit.ly/MU-objectives
Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA): http://bit.ly/MACRA-facts

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FREE WEBINAR for those selling into EU, Asia/Pacific, and North America

http://medgroup.biz/EPR-compliance-fees

Manufacturers selling into these geographies should attend next Tuesday’s webinar about packaging, waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), and battery recycling regulations.

Attend for a free and easy way to learn how to avoid fees for noncompliance.

The slides, video replay, and transcript will be available for all who register, even if you can’t make the live event.

That link again: http://medgroup.biz/EPR-compliance-fees

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CAN YOU ANSWER these member questions about:

Design validation: http://bit.ly/design-val

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Make it a great week.

Joe Hage
Medical Devices Group Leader

P.S. Who will win a ticket to the 10x Medical Device Conference by guessing the Super Bowl winner? Try your luck at http://medgroup.biz/superbowl

Sean Orr, M.D.
Founder at Axion Insights, Inc
I’m skeptical that the meaningless abuse will cease with this announcement. Physicians have been railroaded into the current Orwellian state of disempowerment. The industry is just now “waking up” to the fact that doctors should have been consulted, studied, tracked better? I call B.S. on the whole racket. The very fact that the current administration had had to create a “hardship exemption” is the consequence of the fact that the initiative was flawed. Turning productive physicians into highly paid data entry clerks did not inject value into the industry. And forcing Doctor’s into the position of having to hire scribes only has fed the malpractice attorneys’ business and opened more avenues for hospital administrative graft. It’s a sad place we find ourselves in today.

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥
You’re right, Ann. I confused it with https://ehrintelligence.com/news/stages-of-meaningful-use-emr-adoption-himss-analytics-qa.

What’s your viewpoint on Slavitt’s announcement last week?

Ann Farrell
Principal Farrell Associates, LLC a boutique HIT consulting firm
Joe – you’re confusing MU with HIMSS EMRAM with 7 “stages”?

Bruce Carlson
Publisher of Kalorama Information, Part of Bioinformatics Inc.
I think the most positive thing to say about MU is that it was an attempt to avoid merely subsidizing software purchases, which might have attracted equal criticism, and was an attempt to say – if you are going to purchase it with help from us, you have to show use, not just a receipt. Obviously, the program reduced paper records and increased electronic data entry in some form.

It does appear however, that better study of day-to-day clinical practice would have been advised, and the length of time for each use stage should have been enlarged from the start. Healthcare is less “techy” than other industries. There is an IT staff shortage at most medical centers. EMR purchases were made quickly (we tracked double-digit growth in EMR after incentives) Good for the marketplace/vendors, but maybe too fast? Some of the software turned out to be not well-designed for a doctor or office staff’s world – too many menus, too many clicks – slowed compliance.