In the incestuous world of the healthcare sector, HHS is bringing together the usual suspects in HIT to discuss what exactly “meaningful use” means within the context of the ARRA HITECH Act.  The meeting will take place next week, April 28 & 29, in Washington DC.

Meaningful use is right up there with “certified EHR” as the real sticking points in the future distribution of the $19B to incent physicians to adopt HIT.  In that legislation, the Act provides guidance as to what meaningful use may consist of but it is only guidance.  To actually make all of this work, much clearer guidelines are required to set verification requirements for reimbursement to physicians of their investment and meaningful use of certified EHRs.

At this juncture guidance defines meaningful use as meeting following criteria:

1) Electronic Prescribing: This is a no-brainer as CMS has already put into place carrots today and sticks tomorrow to get physicians using eRx tools.  AllScripts recently reported a huge increase in eRx of over 30% in the most recent quarter. eRx is already being adopted, meaningful use definition here will be easy.

2) Quality Metrics Reporting: Physicians have been providing reports of various types regarding quality metrics for awhile now, so in this instance we are simply moving to an electronic form of reporting.  Where it gets tricky though is in defining what actually will be reported.  This meaningful use metric could go smoothly or really bog down.  Our guess is that the regulators will keep it simple and straight-forward at first to encourage adoption but ratchet-up reporting in future years.

3) Care Coordination: This will be the toughest to define for a whole host of reasons including: lack of infrastructure (“pipes”) to move records, types of data (“water”) as much of the data still can not be readily shared and data ownership.  Wouldn’t it be great to have a patient advocate on the agenda arguing that Care Coordination could be defined as a clinician providing digital records directly to the consumer to assist in coordinated care? Ah, but we digress.  Our prediction is that data sharing for care coordination will be limited to a couple of discrete data sets for now that are already flowing in many HIEs and RHIOS, labs and meds.  As with Quality Reporting, more data elements will be added over time as the pipes fall into place and the data becomes more liquid (interoperable).

Circling all the way back to the beginning though, we are quite disappointed at the agenda for the “Meaningful Use” meeting next week.  Rather than have a balanced mix of those within healthcare as well as “experts” from outside healthcare to assist in defining meaningful use, we have a collection of mostly well-meaning individuals, but individuals who in many respects have helped to create this HIT mess in the firstplace.

Should they really be asked to continue to define our HIT policies going forward or would it not be better to tap into the expertise of those from other sectors who really have no vested interest or ax to grind in healthcare?