In a press conference today, ONC announced the release of the long awaited final version of the “Meaningful Use” rule.
The Office of National Coordination for Health Information Technology received over 2000 comments from across the country during the rule making process. Those comments resulted in a dramatically scaled back set of regulations, while still maintaining the goal of achieving improvement in health care outcome.
The new rule provides 15 core objectives and an “a la cart” menu of an additional 14 objectives from which a provider must choose at least 5, during year one of implementation, which adds flexibility and choice to providers in defining their own pathway to meaningful use. Other key changes included:
- E-prescribing requirement went from 75% to 40%
- Reduction in clinical decision support rules from 5 to 1
- Deferred administrative transactions to stage two
- Reduce the reporting of clinical quality measures for EP from 75 to 45
- The requirement to electronically exchange information was push out to stage 2 and 3 but with a more robust set of standards.
In addition the New England Journal of Medicine published an aritle regarding the final rule.
http://healthcarereform.nejm.org/?p=3732&query=home#printpreviewprintpreview
