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Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | February 09, 2016
From the January/February 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Another incentive for the vendors is the fact that the customers are going to choose which company adapts quicker. NextGen Healthcare has a free service called NG Share that allows its customers to send secure messages using a direct protocol to any other physician who has the direct address. There are now more than 250,000 physicians in the directory and it’s growing every day.
Epic has a service called Care Everywhere and it allows for information to be shared from other Epic systems, a non-Epic system or directly from a patient. However, when an Epic system is on both sides of the exchange, it involves a richer data set and additional connectivity options such as cross-organization referral management.
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GE has also placed a lot of focus on this area. The goal is to have information flow around the health system, the community, the rest of the patient's care team and the payors, faster than the patients move around the hospital and community. “We probably don’t have any installation of our products where there is not some level of interoperability within the system or with a payor, or with another hospital department,” says Jon Zimmerman, general manager of clinical business solutions at GE Healthcare IT.
During the KLAS Keystone Summit in October, 12 companies issued a consensus statement stating that they agree to a set of objective measures of interoperability and ongoing reporting. Those companies include Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Epic, GE, Greenway, Healthland, McKesson, MEDITECH, MEDHOST and NextGen. The next steps are for those companies to put together a cohesive plan and then launch and monitor its progress.
Meaningful Use needs to be more meaningful
“The Meaningful Use program has been, from the beginning, overly complex, overly prescriptive, and a one-size fits-all program, which means that it has been guaranteed to be ill-equipped and ill-designed for everybody,” says Dr. Steven J. Stack, president of the AMA. “They grade it on an all-ornone, pass or fail grade, so you need to get 100 percent to get an A, and if you get a 99 percent or less you fail and get a penalty.”
In 2015, more than 50 percent of all physicians participating in the Medicare program got a one percent penalty, according to Stack. He adds that it’s hard to predict what 2016 will hold but he isn’t optimistic those numbers will get any better and there’s a possibility they will get worse.
In December, AMA released a set of recommendations to improve the program so that it accommodates the real-world needs of physicians and patients while focusing on promoting interoperability. The recommendations were included in comments the AMA sent to CMS on Meaningful Use Stage 3.
