Stage 3 list for meaningful use coming soon

There’s a new checklist coming to town – and it won’t be easy. That would be Stage 3 of meaningful use.

Indeed, the cadre of tasks, from CDS and care coordination, to quality and safety, patient engagement, and population health, promises to go a long way toward industry improvements in care delivery. Simply put: Physicians and hospitals will need to integrate more clinical decision support (CDS) into their practices and coordinate care more extensively to meet meaningful use measures in 2016.

[See also: Meaningful use still a challenge despite strides, say hospitals]

To make that happen, electronic health records will have to be able to perform more complex functions, such as being able to include external medication lists for drug-drug interactions and be able to catch “never” combinations.

[See also: HIMSS' 7 tips for responding to a meaningful use audit.]

Providers will also perform existing measures more often or with a higher percentage of patients, according to preliminary draft recommendations for meaningful use Stage 3 that the advisory Health IT Policy Committee explored at its Aug. 1 meeting. 

While Stage 3 is three and one-half to four years into the future, and the Stage 2 rule is yet to be finalized, the public-private advisory group wanted to start early to signal to industry what improvements it is aiming for in quality, safety, efficiency, patient engagement and population health. Some of the recommendations are still just concepts.

[See also: Interoperability still a barrier to meaningful use, experts find]

For example, physicians may not always pay attention to drug alerts because they believe the system generates many that are unnecessary or they turn off the feature, said Paul Tang, MD, committee vice chair and chair of the meaningful use panel that developed the Stage 3 draft recommendations. 

“We’re looking for an externally maintained list of drug-drug interactions with a higher positive predictive value and that is meaningful about the patient so that the physician will pay attention to it,” he said.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if not every vendor or every provider reinvented their own clinical decision support rules and have something that was open source,” said Tang, who is also chief innovation and technology officer at Palo Alto Medical Foundation. "That's what we're working toward."

A recommended measure to improve performance on priority health conditions would establish 15 clinical decision support (CDS) interventions related to five or more clinical quality measures at a relevant point in patient care.