Even before the government publishes its final definition of “meaningful use,” hospitals across the country are positioning themselves to prove it. It’s what they need to do to be eligible for the $5 million to $10 million in incentives available to hospitals under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Here is what three CIOs are doing:

Sharp HealthCare
At Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, which includes seven hospitals and two medical groups, Vice President and CIO William Spooner has a list, and he’s checking it more than twice.

“I have assigned an analyst to track the meaningful use outline for us and to prepare a high-level readiness/gap analysis for Sharp,” he said.  “I will be reviewing this with our IT steering committee. I will use this as the framework and catalyst as the final regs emerge.”

 “We are plotting our interoperability strategy to both assure meeting the meaningful use requirements and to offer our providers additional connectivity that we think is important to them.  I hope to be quite self-contained for our dedicated provider network while offering the pipe to the community however HIE emerges in our region,” he added.

 “We are coordinating an EHR offering by our primary EHR vendors to be made available to those docs not closely aligned through one of our formal medical groups,” Spooner concluded. “We do not plan a Stark offering but to suggest a package of pre-vetted products/services along with connectivity through our interoperability platform.”

Brigham and Women’s
At Brigham and Women’s in Boston, vice president and CIO Sue Shade says the hospital is in good shape to show meaningful use.

Brigham and Women’s is a 770-bed teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a founding member of the Partners Healthcare System.

“We have a lot of the core pieces already in place,” Shade said. “We’ve had order entry for a very long time. We got electronic medication administration record in place for our core inpatients. We have an electronic medical record for ambulatory. We have a patient portal.”

“We’ve got a lot of the fundamentals already there,” she said. “One of the things that we are still working on is documentation in the inpatient setting. So that’s a pretty major undertaking for us.”

Shade said the Brigham and Women’s team is working on the gap analysis. Though it’s likely there is more work to be done to meet the criteria, she said she does not expect it to be extensive.

“As far as meaningful use not being final, in my view it’s close enough. I don’t think it’s going to change that much in the end,” she said.  “I don’t think anybody should be sitting and waiting until it’s final. If you don’t have those core systems in place, this is the time. You need to start or accelerate your evaluation process with vendors and begin moving ahead on that.”

Shriners Hospitals for Children
At Shriners Hospitals for Children, headquartered in Tampa, Fla., with 20 hospitals across the country and one in Montreal, William Bria, MD, chief medical information officer, says meaningful use has been the focus of IT for a long time.

“Our take on what is meaningful is if we lose sight of patient care, then it’s meaningless,” he said.

There are EHR systems at work in all Shriners hospitals and CPOE uptake is at 88 percent, Bria said. There is an extended informatics delivery system in place, he added, as well as a clinical analyst and a database for the entire Shriners system.

All of this means nothing, stresses Bria, if it can’t be used to help the nurse on the floor make sure she is delivering the right medication to the right patient.

“The most important thing is to have your eye on the real prize,” he said.

Data has to be analyzed, he said, and the analysis used to drive improvement to care delivery.