Meaningful Use of EHR

I agree that meaningful use is the utilization of EHR to improve quality of care—and not just for patients but providers and medical staff as well. As we continue to implement EHR across our sites, the necessity to imbed best practices into the visit templates becomes more apparent. Imbedded best practices enhance providers’ abilities to treat patients and ensure that appropriate health maintenance measures are being ordered (mammogram, annuals, A1C’s, retinal scans, etc.).

The additional trick here then is to also make the EHR easy to use for providers so that their time is “meaningful” and spent with the patient instead of mining the system to find what they need. The single consolidated patient record will also enable providers to access patient information at remote sites such as the hospital and/or other system clinics, improving their ability to assess and diagnose accurately.

Lastly, the reporting capabilities of the EHR and consolidation of records will allow our organization to examine “meaningful” data. Not only will our organization be able to track our progress on internal CQI measures, but we will be able to assess trends across our system, and also compare trends with other OCHIN member clinics, and our regional network partners. Thus, “meaningful” becomes a concept defined not solely by single access points but, more so, by multiple systems of clinics working to improve the quality of care patients receive.