Published for The Washington Times, August 20th, 2010:

By Tevi Troy and Dr. Jason D. Fodeman

With federal checks for electronic health records only months away, our nation’s health care system is on the brink of an unprecedented digital makeover. The stage was set for this technological revolution when $20 billion in government money for health information technology found its way into the $787 billion stimulus bill. The stimulus package contains bonus payments to doctors and hospitals designed to encourage adoption of electronic health records starting in 2011. These payments are to be phased out gradually and replaced by penalties beginning in 2015. The stimulus legislation also created the Office of the NationalCoordinator for Health Information Technology and directed it to establish standards to attain interoperability and define key terms.

The government recently released its final definition of “meaningful use” of a certified electronic health record (EHR). Unsurprisingly, the new rule increased the expected government outlays in this area to $27 billion. On the policy front, compared to earlier versions, the final rules contain fewer requirements to demonstrate meaningful use and thus qualify for the adoption subsidies. The new regulations reduce the meaningful-use core requirements from 25 for doctors and 23 for hospitals to 15 and 14, respectively, and additional requirements can be delayed until a later stage. This added flexibility appears to have been in response to overwhelming sentiment expressed in about 2,000 comments that the initial requirements were too ambitious and needed to be scaled back. It seems as if the regulatory officials overreached and were therefore forced to reverse course.

While the scaled-back requirements are better, federal regulators are still expecting health care providers to do too much in too little time. This has the potential to undermine the administration’s efforts to secure wide-scale EHR adoption.

Full article here