‘Meaningful Use’: What’s It All About, And Why Should Nurses Care?

By Susan McBride, PhD, RN, professor at Texas Tech University Health Science Center School of Nursing. McBride and fellow nurse informaticists Mari Tietze and John Delaney will be blogging here on the intersection of nursing and informatics in the coming days. 

Everyone knows by now that the Obama administration has made electronic health records (EHRs) a high priority and is providing financial incentives to health care providers (and yes, nurses are included in that group) to adopt them. But not everyone knows it’s not just about converting records from paper to digital—its much more than that.

On July 13, the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology (HIT) released the final rules establishing definitions for the “meaningful use” of EHRs. The final rule is 864 pages and contains critical information for nurses to understand about how electronic records will change our lives. 

(No one expects every nurse to read the entire document. That’s why we’re going to be blogging about some important aspects of the topic. In the meantime, click here for a good overview of meaningful use and electronic medical records, as well as links to more exhaustive information. And for a short, useful table breaking down the rule by health outcomes policy priorities such as “improving care coordination,” have a look at this PDF: Stage 1. Meaningful Use Objectives and Associated Measures Sorted […]

2016-11-21T13:16:23-05:00July 26th, 2010|digital health, Nursing|6 Comments
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Hospital Execs Assert They’re ‘Scared to Death’ by Reform Measures

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

On Friday, at the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) meeting in Chicago, I attended a session in which a panel of hospital executives discussed how their facilities would be affected by health care reform. They weren’t really sure of anything except that they’d probably lose money.

The panel included Richard Gamelli of Stritch School of Medicine and the Loyola University Health System, Jeffrey Hillebrand from NorthShore University HealthSystem, and Jim Skogsbergh from Advocate Health Care.

Skogsbergh was the most dire: “I’m scared to death about health care reform and I’m not sure how it will all shake out. The only thing I do expect is to that I’m going to get paid a lot less.” An attendee asked if hospitals would do better now that patients they cared for as charity patients would have health insurance under the new law. Gamelli answered that that depended on the insurance. Currently, he said, his facility is only reimbursed for 90% of costs incurred by Medicaid patients and 50% of those incurred by Medicare patients.

Where’s the innovation? The session was disappointing in that it was mostly about how these megahospital systems would deal with the financial implications. It would have been interesting to have a perspective from a small community hospital. And other than a program mentioned by Hillebrand to try to reduce hospital readmissions among patients with chronic disease, there seemed to be little focus on finding new approaches to cutting costs through improving quality.

2016-11-21T13:18:03-05:00April 26th, 2010|health care policy|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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