This morning HHS held a live webcast (I guess it’s a news conference?) announcing the final meaningful use rule. Unfortunately, it was a little early for me on the west coast (the life of a blogger), but I caught the second half of the webcast.

Seems like they have made some changes to the meaningful use program. The most notable I think are the drop in percentage of ePrescriptions that are required (now at 40% I believe) and the mandatory and ala carte meaningful use requirements.

I’m really interested to look into how they’ve implemented the second option. I believe this is how they’re trying to deal with the problems of meaningful use and specialties. So, hopefully the mandatory meaningful use requirements will be those that apply to ALL specialties and then the ala carte items can be customized to each specialties needs.

I’m sure I’m missing some other notable details. I’ll do what I can over the next week to look over the documents and the other meaningful use coverage on the web to bring you more analysis on the announcement.

In the mean time, it looks like CMS has published a website on the EHR incentive programs. They even have this page on Meaningful Use which includes the download of the Meaningful Use final rule.