Since the Meaningful Use and Certification proposed rules have been released, have read numerous articles, posts and tweets to gain some perspective on the ramifications of these rules on the market.  The best piece I’ve read by far is that from Beth Israel Deaconess’s (BIDMC) own CIO, John Halamka.  As many already know, Halamka has been very instrumental in the development of various standards via his leadership of HITSP and is arguably one of the most knowledgeable on the subject.

In his post, Halamka lays out the strategy that he and his team intend to follow at BIDMC. Though this post is certainly not as long as the nearly 700pgs of documentation that HHS released, listing 25 key actions that BIDMC will take is quite comprehensive and worthy of reading completely through to th end. While some of their strategic steps will be difficult for other hospitals to follow (e.g. BIDMC’s use of  the existing network NEHEN which will help BIDMC meet many meaningful use criteria), the overall plan is worthy of emulation.

Couple of final points:

1) Halamka is speaking from the perspective of a CIO in a major healthcare organization.  His plan will not be terribly useful for a small practice or rural hospital that does not have the same resources at its disposal.

2) As part of their plan, BIDMC/Halamka frequently refers to Microsoft’s HealthVault and Google Health as a key part of enabling consumer access to and control of their personal health information (PHI) via use of CCD or CCR standards.  It is Chilmark Research’s opinion that to meet meaningful use criteria for consumer access to and control of PHI, practices and hospitals will increasingly enable such functionality through their own gateways to these two Personal Health Platform (PHP) services