Meaningful Use

When I think of meaningful use, the first thing that comes to my mind is "useful information". An EMR can put you in a box--in other words, you must fit yourself to the system--which provides you with legible documentation, and a lot of it. That does not mean what is being regurgitated out of the box is something you can use to take care of patients. The information must be readily accessible; must be organized in a way that makes sense to the clinician; must be able to be used by all the disciplines working in health care; must be able to help a clinician do the basic tasks which are critical to daily clinical care (labs, prescriptions, etc.). Once you have the basics down, which is no easy task, you can start to talk about improving the quality of your care. At that level, I would say meaningful use would be decision support at the clinician/patient interface. for example, you're trying to help a patient learn to self-manage her diabetes. The EMR has (or should have) reams of data related to weight, HgbA1c, and medications. Can this information be put into graphs or charts to help the patient begin to track her progress? If not, then no matter how much data you have, I don't think it's meaningful use of an EMR. The final step is the use of data in the aggregate to report on individual clinician outcomes or the outcomes of the practice as a whole, and to use that data to continually improve your care.