Clarifying Certification Requirements for Hospitals

With all the changes happening to Meaningful Use, Quality Measurement, and MACRA in 2016, I ’ve been asked many questions by many organizations to help them plan for the future.As I ’ve said many times, one of the great challenges we have is that the 2015 Edition final rule has an enormous scope extending beyond Meaningful Use with the notion that it can be coupled to every government healthcare IT program.  Standards needs to be based on requirements and specific use cases with little optionality, so creating a broadly scoped rule before the use cases are known just doesn ’t work.  Although it is my hope that the tight coupling of the 2015 Edition final rule to various programs will be eliminated eventually, it is important to understand what certifications are needed for what programs in 2016, 2017 and 2018.For example, all current BIDMC systems are certified to the 2014 Edition.  Will we be able to participate in government programs in 2016 using the 2014 Edition Certification? Yes!  Will we be able to participate in government programs in 2017 using the 2014 Edition Certification? Yes!  Only in 2018 will we have to be certified to the 2015 Edition and we can all hope that the certification concept is revised before then.Here ’s an example of the actual language in regulations illustrating certification requirements. Please find below rule text excerpts and citations to the Hospital Inpatien...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs