Health IT group approves standards and quality measures
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
A group charged with identifying health IT standards to advance goals of the economic stimulus approved July 21 measures that healthcare providers must put in place in 2011, as well as a roadmap for future work.
The HIT Standards Committee recommended quality measures and standards that are ready and deployable to support the criteria for meaningful use, said Jonathan Perlin, chief medical officer and president of clinical services at HCA, and chair of the HIT Standards Committee.
“The goal is to move from just reporting data elements to how the data can improve healthcare” he said.
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, providers will be eligible for increased Medicare and Medicaid payments if they can show they are meaningful users of certified health IT.
The standards committee identified those standards that align with meaningful use and the other statutory requirements of the stimulus and those that are deployable in 2011, 2013 and beyond, said John Halamka, chair of the Health IT Standards Panel.
“We know the industry has to move, but the pace of change can only be so fast. Not only do we have to consider the goal but how to get their,” said Halamka, chief information officer of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and also co-chair of the standards committee’s clinical operations work group.
The group was looking for a “comfort levels” in the standards and quality measures that physicians and hospitals could accomplish, he said, adding that, over time, there will be fewer variables in how providers achieve the goals.
A matrix of 27 quality measures and 12 standards capabilities, which are endorsed by HITSP, a standards organization formed by the Office of National Health IT Coordinator in 2005, build on each other for improved patient outcomes. A number of the standards already exist or are ready to be deployed for 2011, while others for 2013 and 2015 need more work, Halamka said.
Providers already report most of the quality measures to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, such as the percent of patients with blood pressure under control, the percent of claims submitted electronically and insurance eligibility checked electronically.
To report the quality measures, the work group recommended that providers have implemented the 12 HITSP endorsed standard capabilities, including being able to transmit in-hospital and out-patient prescriptions, structured health data such as those for discharge summary and continuity of care documents, and lab test results.
Providers who have not begun to adopt electronic health records and other health IT standards may use unstructured data such as documents in PDF format in 2011, but must by then be able to meet the structured data standard to report quality measures, Halamka said.
The committee also recommended that providers be fully compliant with the HIPAA privacy and security rule in 2011 as part of meaningful use.
Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator, must craft an interim final rule on meaningful use criteria by December. CMS will issue a rule also in December defining meaningful use for the incentive program.
