Meaningful Use for Eligible Professionals: The Top Ten Challenges
Author: Walt Zywiak, Jane Metzger, Michele Mann
Eligible professionals (ambulatory and outpatient care providers) who expect to share American Recovery and Reimbursement Act of 2009 stimulus incentives for using electronic health records (EHRs) must meet EHR meaningful use stage 1 criteria to be eligible.
These criteria, develop by the Office of the National Coordinator and finalized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, cover numerous functions, features and processes that are part of EHR use, and meeting them will be a challenge both to eligible professionals that are still without an EHR (the majority), and those that already have an EHR (almost all of which need upgrades to be a meaningful use eligible professional criteria).
This paper defines meaningful use stage 1 eligible professionals in more detail, provides a summary table of meaningful use Stage 1 criteria (incrementally more demanding Stage 2, Stage 3 and possible subsequent stage criteria will follow), and discusses what we consider to be the top ten challenges to meeting meaningful use Stage 1 criteria. Challenge discussions include a brief description of and what has to be addressed to overcome each.
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