After months of anticipation, the definition of Meaningful Use has arrived.

Today at the meeting of the HIT Policy Committee, the Workgroup on Meaningful Use presented its work, as a preamble and a matrix.

The meaningful use matrix is organized into specific meaningful use goals to be achieved by 2011, 2013, and 2015. It also lists metrics for these goals to evaluate hospital and clinician progress in meeting them.

Over the past 60 days, HITSP Tiger Teams have been hard at work simplifying the HITSP Interoperability Specifications by creating a small set of services which we call Capabilities. You'll see that these capabilities support all the data exchanges needed for meaningful use, including clinical operations (lab, rad, eRx, clinical summary), clinical quality (quality/performance measures, public health reporting, biosurveillance, immunization registries), and privacy/security (encryption, authorization, auditing are built into the HITSP capabilities).

If you need an elevator speech about meaningful use, slides 22-32 in the HIT Policy Committee meeting presentation provides a great overview of the criteria supporting five focus areas:

Improve Quality, Safety, Efficiency

Engage Patients and Families
Improve Care Coordination

Improve Population and Public Health

Ensure Privacy and Security Protections


Now that the initial definition of meaningful use is available, the HIT Standards Committee workgroups and HITSP will work through the month of July to ensure the matrix is populated with the most up to date standards and implementation guide detail.

Hospitals and Clinician offices now know what is expected for 2011, so the time is now to begin your software implementations.

John Halamka, MD, blogs regularly at Life As a Healthcare CIO.