Wading Through Capital Hill Waters
In February, the Obama administration announced plans to give nearly $1 billion in grants to help health care providers implement health IT systems.
Funding for the awards comes from last year's federal economic stimulus package (Johnston, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek, 2/12).
The grants aim to extend health IT access to more than 100,000 hospitals and primary care physicians by 2014, administration officials said. The funds also will bolster training programs for careers in health care and IT (Zengerle, Reuters, 2/12).
With all of the confusion surrounding Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH or “The Act”) and the Meaningful Use EHR Certification Criteria, we have added a class this year to the conference that specifically addresses these issues.
Although RIS and PACs cannot, at this time, qualify as an EHR by themselves, I do feel that a comprehensive EHR package will need RIS and PACS components in order to fully establish Meaningful Use. Among other things, the facilities will need the results and the order history sent to their EHR in order to meet the criteria set by the the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
Other items within our system that help to meet the criteria are:
- Computerized physician order entry.
- Drug Allergy information.
- ICD-9 reasons that can be associated with the current and active diagnoses.
- Recording of demographics.
- Provide patients with electronic copy of their health information.
- Capability to electronically exchange key clinical information among providers of care and patient authorized entities.
As Swearingen Software continuously updates our product to meet customer needs, we will be reviewing the additional criteria closesly in order to ensure that we provide as much information as possible to further meet these recommendations. If there is a way that we can help your facility to meet these criteria, please don’t hesitate to let us know.