Meaningful Use registrations and payments update

~$24.415 billion in cumulative MU payouts thus far. Stage 2 registrations count, attestations, and payments thus far (through May 2014) are indeed pretty puny. Off to a slow start. Full CMS summary tabular report here (pdf).

HEALTHCARE TRIAGE

Everyone needs to understand the difference between "relative" and absolute" risk and "NNT" (Number Needed to Treat) in healthcare tx.

This is a great series. Clear and quick explanations acorss a breadth of clinical topics.
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UPDATE

Meaningful use program: Code blue

Hit the button, call the crash cart: Meaningful use could be triggering a code blue.

Respected health IT leaders such as meaningful use guru Jim Tate and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka, M.D. may be right in painting a picture of the health IT incentive program as "in need of overhaul." Similar notions show up in letters issued earlier this year by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and American Medical Association calling for "flexibility" in stage 2 rules and last year's letter to HHS from six senators, who termed it a "reboot."

The word we're getting out of Washington D.C. in discussing recent events with sources on and off the record paints a far graver picture than a possible overhaul. Sources tell us that morale at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has withered and Republicans will continue to call into question the existence of the meaningful use program as well as the ONC itself as election season draws closer...

A high-ranking EHR vendor executive familiar with D.C. machinations we spoke to hasn't heard anything about morale issues at ONC. This executive wouldn't be surprised, however, to hear of such problems, considering the barrage of criticism the agency endures from physicians, industry and political foes over the structure, execution and backtracking on meaningful use...

Even if we are stepping into a post-meaningful use world as of today, healthcare CIOs, as they like to put it, will have to keep the lights on: Data will need a place to be stored. Wi-Fi and wired infrastructure will have to work. Clinical data will need to be protected and backed up in compliance with HIPAA. Radiologists and cardiologists will keep cranking out pictures and videos at a record pace. Patients in remote areas will still need telemedicine visits. Payers will still demand that coders and billing departments create claims with ICD codes, documented just so.

In sum, health IT isn't going anywhere.

But meaningful use might be.

Policy ADHD? Will there even be a MU Stage 3?
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Those pesky, troublesome end-users. From Politico:

INDUSTRY, MINUS DOCS AND NURSES, PLEASED WITH DIRECTION OF HEALTH IT RULES: The FDA and a diverse set of industry groups — and even Congress — have reached a high degree of consensus on how to regulate health IT. The only outliers seem to be the doctors and nurses who use the tools every day. As the comment period ended for the framework report on health IT regulation written by the FDA, FCC and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Hill sources pointed to the large overlap of FDA’s vision and that of industry, patient and research groups. “We don’t have any major differences,” says Janet Marchibroda, executive director of the CEO Council on Health and Innovation at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which is central to pushing the regulatory reform agenda. “We are excited because we see a convergence here. And we see agreement on the Hill too. Hooray!” Not everyone is so enthusiastic, including the National Nurses Union, whose director, RoseAnn DeMoro, blasted the FDA report as a “remarkable abdication of federal regulatory responsibility.”

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More to come...