Testify to ONC for MU Stage 2

Last Tuesday, May 20th, I had the privilege of given verbal testimony to the Federal Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, commonly referred to as the ONC.  This was a result of us being the first Hosptial in the US to attest for Stage 2 of the Meaningful Use program.  We only had 5 minutes to share our thoughts on the program and what Hospitals should consider to improve their chances of success.  Below is my testimony from the transcript recording.  I will also include the link to the entire hearing.

Thomas Johnson, MBA, CPA – Chief Information Officer – Penn Highlands Healthcare
Yeah, I’ll go ahead and start. We’re a four hospitals health system in rural Pennsylvania. One of our hospitals is a critical access hospital, we have 130 physician practices as well. So for us, we were an early attester in 2011, so we were one of the first groups to attest for Stage 1. We attested the very minute the site was open for Stage 2, so we believe we were the first hospital to attest for Stage 2 as well. The HITECH Act and Meaningful Use has been a real blessing for our organization, prior to that we may very small investments in IT, we were mostly paper-based and highly siloed. We were arguably a HIMSS 3 hospital now we’re very closely approaching HIMSS 7, so Meaningful Use has been extremely transformative to our organization.

We’ve used a very integrated approach that brought our entire hospital together. It’s greatly increased transparency throughout our organization, we’re able to see where the gaps are in care and address them very quickly. It positioned us as a leader in our region as far as patient safety, as far as quality and outcomes. So Meaningful Use has been a huge focus for us and it’s not isolated to IT. We’ve tried very hard to integrate it into all the projects and initiatives we’re working on. We didn’t simply try to meet the measures, we tried to max the measures, so every measure we tried to hit the maximum in Stage 1, which positioned us very well for Stage 2, which we’re trying to do that as well, tried to hit the max on every measure, which will then position us better for Stage 3. And I’m not just talking core measures, I’m talking doing every menu item as well and doing it at the maximum.

Yes patient safety and engaging patients and their family in care is difficult, but worth it. HIE difficult, but also worth it. Prior to doing HIE we tried to connect our communities. During Stage 1 we gave remote access to all the nursing homes, physician practices, everyone involved in that continuity of care has access to the information. So, it really didn’t benefit us much to do the HIE, because they already had all the information, but we certainly did it to meet the requirement. Further, we added no additional staff to IT or anywhere else in the process. We use Cerner as our EMR and we have a very, very tight relationship with them, which we think is key to being able to be successful.

My biggest concern going forward is as the financial incentives go away, which we just got our last incentive, I’m afraid that we’ll start to see some backsliding because the focus will start to go away, since we got all of our money. So for me going forward, I think the bar continues to need to rise to be able to incentivize the organizations to achieve, otherwise they’ll just go back to paper, is my fear. So, those are my comments, I’ll let Kelly make a few comments. And I do think it’s worth looking at the Jason report as well, as was talked about in the earlier group, I think there are some good ideas there. Kelly, I’ll give you the balance of my time.

Link to the full hearing:  ONC website

MU Stage 2 press releases

Here is the first couple of press releases that we have received since announcing our stage 2 attestation.

Informationweek.com

Distilnfo.com

I am sure there will be more to come as word spreads about our exciting achievement!