Hospitals and eligible healthcare providers have been focused on achieving Meaningful Use Electronic Health Record (EHR) system standards set by The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) since 2012 now.  With Meaningful Use Stage 3, the last of three stages, due to be attested to by the end of 2018 (mandatory) or during 2017 (optional), the healthcare community is finally in the home stretch of achieving truly meaningful use of electronic healthcare records, which will facilitate improved patient care by hospitals and providers, and empower patients to take greater control of their healthcare.
Meaningful Use Stage 3 (MU3) requires that hospitals and eligible physicians meet eight objectives to receive incentives and avoid any penalties.
The objectives are as follows*:

  1. Protected health information (PHI): Eligible physicians must attest to conducting a security risk analysis to assess vulnerabilities to PHI that could lead to data breaches.
  2. Electronic prescribing: Eligible physicians are required to have more than 80% of their permissible prescriptions queried for drug formulary and transmitted to pharmacies electronically.
  3. Clinical decision support (CDS): There are two different measures available for eligible physicians. The first measure covers implementing five CDS interventions. The second measure relates to the active use of drug-drug and drug-allergy interaction checks during the reporting period, which are available within a certified EHR platform.
  4. Computerized provider order entry (CPOE): Eligible physicians are required, under this objective, to meet three different measures for medication, lab and diagnostic imaging orders.
  5. Patient electronic access: To help encourage patient engagement, meaningful use stage 3 includes an objective in which eligible physicians must provide access to EHRs to more than 80% of patients, with the option to view and download the records. In addition, eligible physicians must offer the option to receive educational data to more than 35% of their patients.
  6. Coordination of care through patient engagement: The three measures included in this objective encourage patients to actively engage in their care by necessitating physicians to educate them on and offer capabilities to view patient health data. Eligible providers must attest to all three measures, but meet the thresholds for two of the three.
  7. Health information exchange (HIE): The measures included in this meaningful use objective encourage interoperability. The first measure requires that more than 50% of care transition and referrals include the exchange of care records, such as continuity of care documents (CCD), electronically. The second measure requires physicians who are seeing a patient for the first time to receive care documents electronically from a secondary source more than 40% of the time. The final measure requires physicians to use e-prescribing services to reconcile medication lists from online sources with their own for more than 80% of new patients they see. Eligible providers must attest to all three measures, but meet the thresholds for two of the three.
  8. Public health and clinical data registry reporting: In this objective, providers must choose three out of five available EHR reporting destinations to which they will submit data periodically. Reporting options include an immunization registry, syndromic surveillance, cases, a public health registry and a clinical data registry.

A critical component of the Health Information Exchange MU3 objective is the capacity for the bi-directional exchange of electronic health records by hospitals and physicians.  Summit Healthcare’s new flagship product, Summit Exchange, enables the bi-directional flow of EHR and is 2015 CEHRT certified.
We’d love to help your organization get through the home stretch of MU3.  Please visit us at https://www.summit-healthcare.com or call 781.519.4840 for more information.
Summit Exchange
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The Summit Exchange platform is Summit Healthcare’s newest solution for an ever evolving community. The new platform solves integration challenges in a more powerful, efficient and resilient way by filling the interoperability gaps for those enterprises looking to do more than just meet meaningful use criteria.
 
*Information on MU3 stages from TechTarget.com