Neil Versel at Fierce EMR recently did a post talking about the meaningful use exceptions that are available for specialists. In it he quotes David Blumenthal, national health IT coordinator, and Dr. Derek Robinson, medical director for HHS Region V. They provide an example of an exception to the meaningful use criteria that a specialist might be able to use:

For example, three of the “core” measures of meaningful use that all providers must be able report on are blood pressure levels, whether patients over 13 use tobacco products and adult weight screening. “You may say that one of these or all three of these may not be part of your scope of practice,” Robinson said, amednews reports. It is possible to report zero as both the denominator and numerator for the quality measure if that specific item is outside a physician’s scope of practice.

This is what I was talking about in my last post about the EHR Stimulus money for dentists. No doubt there are a whole lot of specialties that will want to be granted these types of exceptions. It will be interesting to see what the exact process is for being granted the exception. I also won’t be surprised if we see some EMR vendors (specialty specific EMR vendors in particular) helping their doctors apply for these exceptions.

The only problem with the exception is for those specialists where the denominator is not 0, but it’s a very small number. I seem to remember a pediatric orthopedic surgeon saying that he only wrote prescriptions a few times a week. Learning and implementing an ePrescribing system for a couple scripts a week isn’t going to be very fun.

FierceEMR has really hit the healthcare IT arena in force over the past 6 months. They even have a big party planned for HIMSS. I’ll probably be stopping by since it’s the day after the New Media Meetup at HIMSS. Well, one of my favorite healthcare IT writers, Neil Versel wrote an article for FierceEMR that really caught my eye. It was titled, “Kibbe: New ONC standards make CCHIT process ‘irrelevant’”

If you’ve read this blog for any time you know that I’m an enormous fan of CCHIT (that was in the sarcasm font in case you couldn’t tell). I even declared the Marginalization of CCHIT back in July of last year. So, obviously I agree with David Kibbe’s assertion that the CCHIT process is irrelevant thanks to the HITECH act. A section of the article linked above describes some of the major problems with CCHIT:

Kibbe long has said the CCHIT certification process discourages innovation by being too complicated and costly for new, small companies that otherwise might shake up the EHR market with lower-priced, easier-to-use products. He also has held that the certification body was too closely tied to the health IT establishment. “CCHIT in effect acted as judge and jury for its own industry’s definition of EHR software, inhibiting alternative approaches that would embrace component or modular architectures, web-based delivery also known as ‘software-as-a-service,’ and practical means of achieving interoperable data exchange between applications from different vendors,” he says in a recent blog post.

No doubt the CCHIT criteria is no longer meaningful. The only problem is that a question still haunts my mind, “Did we just move the flawed process from CCHIT to ONC?”

If you’ve read much of this blog at all, then you know that I’m not a big fan of CCHIT. The basis of my feeling is that it’s expensive, doesn’t measure EHR usability (despite the impression that it does), and really feels like a coalition of big EHR companies trying to secure their position in the EHR world despite having often inferior products.

All of that aside, the health care IT blogosphere has been posting some amazing accusations about CCHIT. I’ll admit that I don’t have any inside information on the organization and structure of CCHIT. So, I’ll just post all of the various information being posted about CCHIT and let you decide what might be true and what might be conjecture.

Remember that the things below may be rumors, misinformation, politically motivated, flat our wrong, mostly correct, or from disgruntled individuals.  Read everything below and judge for yourself.

See the full coverage of the CCHIT drama after the break
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