CHICAGO – Since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there’s been a lot of emphasis on electronic health record implementation.

As healthcare organizations implement their EHR systems, however, they should build for ARRA’s “meaningful use” criteria from the ground up, said Natalie Berger, PhD, interim program director for MaineHealth’s EHR implementation.

In their session, “Meaningful Use Reporting for ARRA Funding: MaineHealth’s Clinical Improvement Registry,” Tuesday morning at 10am CT, Jeffrey Aalberg, MD, senior medical director, and Tracy Callahan, RN, Diabetes educator, both at Maine Medical Center Physician-Hospital Organization, will share best practices for clinical outcome reporting.

MaineHealth, an integrated delivery network that includes Maine Medical Center, developed its Clinical Improvement Registry in 2004, which enabled it to manage and track five different disease states across hospitals through the sharing of clinical data. As a result of its registry, the IDN is ranked above the national standards for disease management criteria and demonstrates meaningful use, Berger said.

The session will help simplify what is meant by meaningful use by identifying the criteria for clinical outcomes and how to continue to show improvement by collecting the right data, she said. Data collection isn’t just for documentation but for improving the delivery of care, Berger said.

For example, hospital readmission rates can’t be contained or reduced if a hospital’s data merely resides in a data repository. There needs to be care coordination across the system and in an entire region to positively impact readmission rates, Berger said.

It’s critical to get physician adoption of the system and patient engagement, education and support to enable follow-through of appropriate protocols, she said.

With meaningful use criteria becoming more stringent with each of the 2011, 2013 and 2015 deadlines, healthcare organizations need to show improvement over time, Berger said.