eHealth Articles & White Papers

eHealth Gets More Meaningful

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

There has been a lot of buzz around provisions for healthcare technology in the stimulus bill. Priorities, which are still being set, focus on the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), sharing of healthcare information, and using this technology to engage patients directly in the management of their health.

I couldn't be happier that the health consumer is a key audience being addressed as part of this initiative. As a result, this is a great opportunity for eHealth. Unfortunately, too many organizations are approaching this as an information technology project.

For these initiatives to be successful requires deep and direct involvement from those who have had long-term responsibility for communicating with patients and other health consumers - healthcare marketing and eHealth professionals.

ARRA and Meaningful Use

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also known as the stimulus bill, was passed by the Obama administration in February of 2009. It included provisions for promoting the adoption of healthcare I.T., and is known as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) act.

The most heavily discussed components of HITECH are those designed to promote EHR adoption. More specifically, HITECH provides financial incentives to providers who achieve Meaningful Use of a certified EHR system.

So for several months now, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has been convening workgroups to define Meaningful Use.
Meaningful Use represents an important departure from traditional approaches to encouraging technology adoption.

In those traditional approaches, funding is applied for up front and, once granted, is then used to purchase and implement the technologies. Unfortunately, too often these technologies fail to achieve the desired objectives, aren't widely adopted or, in the worst situations, aren't deployed or even purchased.

In contrast, HITECH provides trailing dollars. Monetary incentives are provided only after providers have acquired, installed and are actively utilizing an EHR. To qualify, providers will need to demonstrate that they are achieving specific utilization metrics.

For example, a hospital metric may be that 10% of all orders are entered into a Computerized Physician Order Entry system by the authorizing provider. The financial incentives are significant, up to $44,000 for individual providers and potentially millions for hospitals.

Defining Meaningful Use

You can read the current version of the complete Meaningful Use matrix online, but in general, the goals and metrics follow five policy priorities:

• Improve quality, safety, efficiency, and reduce health disparities 
• Engage patients and families
• Improve care coordination
• Improve population and public health
• Ensure adequate privacy and security protection for personal health information

While many of the targets within these priorities are clearly those for your I.T. department to tackle - CPOE, ePrescribing, participation in Health Information Exchanges (HIE) - others are directed at the consumer, and this is where the marketing, Web and eHealth professionals in your organization need to get involved!

What's eHealth's Role?

Some of the key areas where eHealth can play a role in complying with Meaningful Use requirements are:

• Providing electronic access to the consumer's health information
• Providing clinical summaries of encounters in electronic format
• Sending reminders to health consumers for follow-up or preventative care

I believe that these capabilities are best delivered to the patient by the provider organization in the controlled environment of a patient portal. As a result, these features are going to be at the core of patient portal priorities between now and 2011.

Why should eHealth/Web/Marketing get involved?

• I.T. is typically very good at building tools for internal audiences, but not necessarily for consumers.
• The information presented through the patient portal will need to be re-packaged in a way that is useful to consumers as opposed to clinicians
• A patient portal offers the potential to present a wide variety of information to consumers. Delivering this information in context with service line promotional content, related classes, educational and disease management capabilities, and other useful capabilities will make interactions easier and more valuable for the consumer.
• Good tools fail if no one knows about them. Marketing is uniquely positioned to keep internal and external groups informed and engaged on these initiatives.

So now is the time to step up to the plate, advocate for your health consumers and get involved in these projects.