Great Community, consideration all!

Regarding the grants given, I believe the staggered form of funding does solve most of the confusion.

On the point of usability and defining the term ‘meaningful use’, I would add further that the medical practitioners are looking to avail of this federal incentive by trying to comply with the definition of meaningful use but at the same time EHR providers are looking at their own set of profits.
This misunderstanding is mostly I believe as a result of wrong interpretation of the federal guidelines. The EHR providers need to look at these guidelines from the prospective of the practitioners who deal with different specialties.
Each specialty EHR has its own set of challenges or requirements which I believe is overlooked by im most EHR vendors in a effort to merely follows federal guidelines. This is resulting in low usability to the practitioners, thus less ROI, finally redundancy of the EHR solution in place.
I think ROI is very important factor that should be duly considered when look achieve a ‘meaning use’ out of a EHR solution. Though one may get vendors providing ‘meaning use’ at a lower cost, their ROI / savings through the use of their EHR might be pretty low when compared to costlier initial investment. Found a pretty useful ROI tool
that is pretty customizable and easy to use. It also accounts for the different specialty EHR’s too.
There are other good references on the topics of:

Usability/meaningful use

Certification criteria for EHR

Randolph Sanks
404-786-3297

Thanks for your insightful points. I generally agree with your statement that interoperability doesn’t equate to data liquidity, but worry that people may take away the wrong message about the importance of interoperability. Data liquidity (without interoperability) provides little more than ability to move “data” (with or without semantic meaning)… We’ve been doing that rather successfully for decades… Interoperability helps to assure common meaning and understanding of information.

Both interoperability AND data liquidity are EQUALLY important foundational characteristics of a national/global standards-based electronic health information infrastructure.

Thanks,

Bob Birmingham
Johnson & Johnson

Please, let’s bring the conversation back to are we headed in the right direction via language that states reimbursement for “meaningful use of certified EHR”.

Tom,
Thanks for adding your voice to the chorus of other HIT vendors looking to assist your customers and prospects in understanding the implications of the HITECH Act. It is still very much a work in progress and education of the broader market will be critical.