Sixty percent of hospitals recently surveyed said they are ready to meet 13 or more of the 16 meaningful use Stage 2 core objectives, yet only 6 percent had all 16 capabilities in late 2013.
Speaking at the May 6 Health IT Policy Committee meeting, Jennifer King, research and evaluation branch chief for the Office of the National Coordinator, detailed some findings from an American Hospital Association survey conducted in late 2013. She noted that EHR adoption among hospitals has more than doubled in the last two years and increased more than five-fold since 2008.
Zeroing in on Stage 2 challenges, King noted that only 10 percent reported the capability to let patients view, download and transmit their data, with transmit being the least common. And although this is not a Stage 2 requirement, she noted that only 13 percent report the capability to accept patient-generated data.
At the meeting it was noted that only 4 hospitals and 50 eligible physicians have so far attested to Stage 2. Committee co-chair Paul Tang, M.D., quipped that hospitals attesting before October 2014 is comparable to “students who turn their homework in early.”
Karen DeSalvo, M.D., national coordinator for health IT, led off the May 6 meeting by announcing that as new work groups are being formed, there has been some turnover on the committee.
She and Tang thanked three departing members who have been with the HITPC from its inception. Neil Calman, M.D., CEO of the Institute for Family Health, one of the largest networks of community health centers in New York State; Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic Systems; and Art Davidson, M.D., director of Public Health Informatics for Denver Public Health.
The three new members replacing them are:
• Christoph U. Lehmann, M.D., the founding medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Child Health Informatics Center and a professor in Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, as an expert on vulnerable populations;
• Neal Patterson, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Cerner Corp. as a vendor representative;
• Kim J. Schofield, health educator and advocacy chair for the Lupus Foundation of America’s Georgia Chapter, representing consumers and patients.
