The following is part of an email interaction I had with an EHR vendor about the future of CCD. Of course, I can never let strong opinions go unpublished. So I asked if I could put this on my site. I have a feeling there will be many people who have a different view of CCD and how these standards will play out. I’d certainly be happy to publish an opposing view as well. My contact page is here. I’m interested to hear other view points on the subject.

Stage 1 MU allowed either CCR or CCD. Stage 2, and the short term efforts will require CCD. The jury is still out on what Stage 3 of MU will focus upon. Many at the ONC can see that the CCD will never have the flexibility to deliver. These are largely the same people that facilitated the Direct Project initiatives.

I still predict that it is inevitable that the data will become uncoupled from unwieldy, anachronistic document structures. That will be the only means to get to true information portability that can deliver patient-centric use of the information. The CCD will still be around for a while to come, just as CD’s are still around for music sharing. For now, we have to have the CCD to preserve legacy, industry-centric control of the information.

John Halamka has a couple of recent posts that do a good job of explaining what is evolving…. http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/09/september-hit-standards-committee.html and http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/10/cool-technology-of-week.html . Both of these contain links to some very interesting information. When the ONC proceeded to issue an advanced notice of rulemaking, the industry power elites became enraged. http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2011/9/22/groups-urge-onc-not-to-include-metadata-standards-in-stage-2.aspx

Technology delivering to patients will eventually win out just as the open-platform WWW won out over proprietary CompuServe. http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/onc-metadata-ehr-meaningful-use-43021-1.html Once we have a means to truly exchange the content without the overhead associated with the CCD/RIM crap, we will see a revolution in healthcare similar to the social networking phenomenon.

Again, the whole CCD/CDA will stick around to support legacy information needs, but it will eventually be largely eclipsed by more straight-forward solutions that don’t require a team of consultants and IT engineers to implement.

The always opinionated Anthony Guerra has an article up on Information Week that describes why he thinks the Meaningful Use sky is falling. Add that to a recent comment I got on a previous post that links to a Healthcare Data Management article talking about the potential repeal of the HITECH act and it seems worthwhile to assess the state of meaningful use.

I’ll start with the potential repeal of meaningful use first. We’ve known for a long time that the house was going to be going after healthcare reform once the republicans took over control of the house. In fact, we posted about the potential impacts to HITECH from the new Congress before.

I personally get the feeling that not much has changed on this front. I’m going to reach out to some of the government liasons for EHR vendors that I know that follow this even closer than I do. However, I still believe that:
1. The HITECH funding or at least the Medicare and Medicaid stimulus funding is safe from Congress. I’ve read this a couple of places and so I believe it to be true.
2. Any legislation that is passed by the house still has to pass through the democratic controlled Congress and avoid the Presidential veto. These two seem unlikely.

Of course, when it’s government work you could always be surprised by some loophole in the process that impacts funding or legislation. I won’t be surprised if one of these loop holes appears and affects the HITECH act. However, I still argue that if something does happen to HITECH, it will likely be a casualty of some other political agenda (ie. cutting whatever costs they can find) and not actually because they were specifically targeting HITECH.

Long story short: I still feel like the EHR incentive portion of HITECH is likely safe. Maybe some of the other funding will be cut short. We’ll see.

Now to the points that Anthony Guerra makes in his article. He describes the challenges that many hospitals are facing in regards to meaningful use. Plus he highlights the potential difference in the number of people who “think they qualify for the money” and those who “plan to apply.”

I might argue that if EHR adoption is the goal, then this might not be such a bad result. The idea of “forcing” meaningful use on people has always bothered me a little bit. Encouraging people to show meaningful use is only as good as the meaningful use criteria. If the meaningful use criteria is not very good, then do we really want everyone showing meaningful use?

For example, imagine that a doctor or hospital decides to use an EHR based on the EHR software’s ability to improve the efficiency of their office and the quality of the services they provide to the patient, but deems meaningful use as contrary to those goals. This seems like a great outcome to me. In fact, it seems like a better outcome than a doctor trying to force themselves into the meaningful use hole.

Obviously there are parts of meaningful use that can be very beneficial. For example, having an EMR that can communicate using a standard format (CCD for example) is important and valuable. If it is beneficial, then I see most doctors implementing these features regardless of whether they showed meaningful use or not.

One thing definitely seems clear from all the surveys and other stats I have: interest in EMR has never been higher. Whether that translates to “meaningful use” of a “certified EHR” or physicians meaningfully using an EHR of their choice, is fine with me.

You know my mantra: Select and implement an EMR based on the benefits that you and your clinic want to receive from the EMR. Don’t select and implement it based on a government handout. Those hand outs will be gone after a few years, but your EMR will be with you long after.

In one of my many discussions with people at HIMSS 10 we started talking about EHR interoperability standards. The person I was talking to worked as an engineer for a vendor that’s entire work is interoperability of EHR data. As we talked, I made the comment that it seems like CCD has won the battle for EMR interoperability. He gave me a kind of blank stare and said, yeah. Basically his response was like yeah everyone knows that. Almost as if there weren’t any other real EMR interoperability options out there. Well, I guess someone better let Google Health know too.

As I went through the HIMSS showroom floor, I got the same feeling.

The good thing is that I think the people behind CCR are satisfied with this result since CCD is a derivative of sorts from CCR.

In response to my previous post about CCR and CCD, I’ve learned a whole bunch about the two different standards for healthcare data exchange. Although, I must admit that it’s all a bit messy right now.

Since I know that many of you don’t read all the comments on the site, nor do you get to read the emails I receive, I think you’ll find some of the following links about CCR and CCD quite interesting.

First is a description of the difference between CCR and CCD. This is written by David Kibbe who helped create the CCR specifications. So, keep that in perspective, but it’s a really interesting write up comparing the two standards.

Dr. Jeff also put together this interesting “summary” of CCR and CCD. It’s a little scattered, but has some good nuggets in it that expanded my knowledge of the various standards.

The other good thing that came out of my previous post is an interview with Dr. David Kibbe which I’ll be posting next week. He ducks some of the politically charged questions, but I think you’ll really enjoy the interview. If you don’t, I’m sure you’ll be willing to let me know that too.

I’ve been a fan of the concept of CCR since it first started many years ago. However, I’ll be honest that I haven’t followed the progression of CCR much since then.

I know that Google Health was using a modified version of CCR. I also know a number of EMR vendors that have integrated CCR with their EMR. So, I’m looking to my readers to give me an update on what’s been happening with CCR.

Also, I’ve been hearing some people refer to it as CCD instead of CCR. I think that CCD stands for continuity of care document. I assume it’s basically the document that CCR uses to share healthcare information?

At one of the conferences I attended, they suggested that CCR was the standard that was going to be used to show “meaningful use.” I haven’t ever seen the standard formalized. Did I miss this somewhere?

Ok, here’s looking to you. Leave some comments on what you know about CCR.