ONC HIT Policy Committee Meeting

I read that the HIT Policy Committee meeting that happened on July 16, 2009 was a “big one” according to Chilmark Research. He said that “the committee went from hearing revised recommendations for Meaningful Use, to recommendations from the HIE workgroup and lastly recommendations regarding certification processes for EHRs.”

I was unfortunately tied up doing a presentation on ARRA EHR Stimulus money and so I wasn’t able to follow the event live (or on one of my twitter accounts). I know that Chilmark is planning to do some posts and I’m looking forward to those.

I also found this short summary from John Halamka about the changes to meaningful use in the final definition:
1. For inpatient CPOE, only 10% of orders must be entered electronically
2. For problem lists, ICD9 or SNOMED must be used
3. Advanced directives must be recorded
4. Smoking status must be recorded
5. Quality measures must be reported to CMS
6. Clinicians and Hospitals must implement at least one clinical decision rule relevant to a high clinical priority
7. Administrative transactions, including eligibility and claims, must be completed electronically

I think it was wise for them to split it out into an “eligible provider” and a “hospital” set of requirements since the needs are different, but at first glance it seems a bit like ambulatory clinics are getting a bit of a shaft in this regard. I’ll reserve final judgement until I have more time to really review the changes.

I do think this change as described by John Halamka is a good one: “The Meaningful Use Workgroup recommended use of an ‘adoption year’ timeframe (i.e., ‘2011 measures’ applies to first adoption year even if HIT adopted in 2013; ‘2013 measures’ applies to 3rd adoption year.”

This powerpoint about EHR certification was also presented at this meeting. There’s a lot of information in that powerpoint, but it looks like they’re proposing that CCHIT be relegated to a certifying body, but not be involved in defining the certification criteria. HHS will be defining the EHR certification criteria. I’m sure I’ll be writing much more about the content in this presentation. Lots to still digest.

I also found two draft transcripts from the meeting.

If anyone else knows of some other summaries from this meeting please let me know in the comments and I’ll add them here. Or feel free to make your own summary in the comments. I’m always interested to hear what people thought was important from meetings like this.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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