CNEA Question #6, Meaningful Use

Although Redwood Community Health Coalition (RCHC) has not gone to the level of detail of mapping the proposed measures to our templates (particularly since they are not final), we are confident that our health centers will be able to meet them by 2011. E-prescribing is part of the EHR product. We are piloting HIE with three of our local hospitals. We structured almost 200 data points into our "Community Health Center Build" (RCHC standardized templates of the most common visit types based on evidence and best practices), and we are modifying these every six months or so. We are piloting the patient portal. Security and disaster recovery are basic components of our network infrastructure.

All that said, we strongly urge the ONC, CMS, HRSA and anyone else involved that the most cost-saving action the federal government could make is to require all vendors to have MU functionality a part of their CCHIT certification. This would save providers hundreds of millions of dollars. RCHC figures that over 100 hours of clinician time went into creating our standardized templates with structured data elements so that they could be reported. And we are currently spending weeks of staff time getting the reporting functionality where we need it. If vendors were required to have that functionality as a cost of doing business, it would ease adoption immensely while saving millions of dollars.