Update from Walnut Creek

HIMSS, EHRA add to the chorus of Stage 3 Meaningful Use

Author Name Jennifer Bresnick   |   Date January 24, 2013 

Following open letters to the Office of the National Coordinator provided by the AHA, AMA, CHIME, and ACOEM, HIMSS and the Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA) added their acronyms to the professional organizations responding to the open comment period about Stage 3 Meaningful Use. The EHRA is an EHR vendor association organized under HIMSS, and includes such prominent names as Allscripts, Siemens, Practice Fusion, and Cerner... 

The EHRA joins the AHA and others in urging the government to push back the timeline for Stage 3, suggesting an implementation date three years after Stage 2 comes into effect.  HIMSS states that whatever the final Stage 3 date will be, “we request that the Final Rule be published at least 18 months before the beginning of the required implementation period. This will allow adequate time for developers to make the needed technology changes, for the industry to develop its response, for certification, to occur, and for providers to plan and implement required software and process changes.” 

The two organizations also focus on ensuring that the new standards are clear and achievable for a majority of eligible providers, and don’t put an undue burden on providers with time-intensive data collection processes or other detrimental workflow adjustments...

Props to EHR Intelligence for that update. That's pretty interesting. Whatever gets decided, RECs will be long gone, I would think. Below, a snip from Dr. Mostashari's latest ONC Buzz Blog post.

All the Tools in the Toolbox: How ONC Delivered Value In 2012 

Technical Assistance & Cooperative AgreementsThe Regional Extension Centers (RECs) continue their work to support primary care providers operating in small or medically underserved settings to implement EHR systems and achieve Meaningful Use. To date, the RECs have worked with 132,842 primary care providers in more than 31,000 different practices, which represents approximately 42% of all the primary care providers in the United States. 

The RECs have also worked with over 80% of all the federally qualified health centers and over 70% of the nation’s critical access hospitals. More than 100,000 of these providers are now live on an EHR system and nearly 40,000 have achieved Meaningful Use.

That's it. Nothing on continuing the REC program. But, an otherwise nice, detailed self-congratulatory post.

I'm on vacation in the Bay Area this week, btw. Hence the relative quietude here on the REC blog. Be back at it in force come Monday the 28th. Couple of shots from my downtown SF ramble in the rain.

Saturday the 27th

Cheryl and I had dinner last night with Doc Gurley and her husband Owen Linderholm at a hip restaurant in Rockridge, Guest Chef. Awesome evening with two extremely interesting, fine people.

Above: we were out in the back yard at Cheryl's place Friday afternoon, and this hawk was hovering above in the wind, about 300 feet away (grocery shopping, I guess). This is a C/U crop of a shot I got with my Sony 300 mm lens. Beautiful bird.

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More to come...