Topics
- Introduction to meaningful use
- What happened to it?
- What is advancing care information?
- How is it different from meaningful use
- Next steps with this information
What happened to meaningful use? Is it over? Not dead but re-created. Known as the EHR Incentive Program, meaningful use only changed its name to advancing care information. The concept didn’t disappear, it came stronger and expanded. What happened to meaningful use?
What is meaningful use?
Before answering what happened to meaningful use, it’s very important to have meaningful use knowledge! So, what is meaningful use? The meaningful use creation purpose is to enhance the cooperation between the public and the clinical healthcare. This way benefits patient-centric preventative care. Also, supporting the continuous development of standardized, robust data exchanges. We reveal the implementation of the three stages of meaningful use:
Stage 1: Focuses on the promotion of adopting certified EHR technologies. Within this stage, healthcare facilities adopt the electronic capture of clinical data. Also, stage 1 Focuses on giving access for patients to electronic copies of their own information.
Stage 2: Motivates the meaningful use of CEHRT and is an expansion for Stage 1. Stage 2 encourages care coordination and the interchange of patient data. It boosts the thresholds for criteria compliance and brings better decision support. Moreover, it increases the requirements for care coordination and the rules of patient engagement.
Stage 3: While focusing on the usage of CEHRT to support health outcomes, stage 3 implements protected health information. Additionally, stage 3 increases support for e-prescribing, computerized provider order entry, and clinical decision support.
What happened to it?
Meaningful use, What happened to it? Seriously, what happened to meaningful use? Not much in fact. Instead of meaningful use, we call it, “advancing care information”.
Advancing care information is part of the Merit-based Incentive Payment System, (MIPS). Statistically speaking, advancing care information makes it focused on the interchange of health data securely. Moreover, it ensures the usage of certified electronic health record technology (CEHRT).
It encompasses the same concept of meaningful use with less burdensome technology. Consequently, it is viewed as more connected and simpler while being more flexible. Reducing burden and improving patient outcomes can sum the process up. However, we prepared some facts regarding it.
1- Advancing care information is similar to meaningful use.
2- In 2017, 4 required objectives are mentioned for base score: Health Information Exchange, patient access, e-prescribing and security risk analysis.
3- CMS awards a bonus score for enhancement activities that use CEHRT as well for reporting to clinical data registries and public health.
What is advancing care information?
Are you wondering What is advancing care information? ACI is one of the 3 performance (2017) categories weighted for clinician’s eligibility score on holistic performance. This is under MIPS (Merit-based Incentive Payment System). As per MIPS, the scoring of ACI is fixed depending on the clinician’s satisfaction with the 4 needed ACI measures.
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How is it different from meaningful use?
Let’s establish How it is different from meaningful use. First off, the purpose behind this replacement is the realignment of payments with quality care that is patient-centered. Thus, the initiative provides better flexibility for doctors in terms of reporting quality care. Certified EHR is also involved.
Therefore, the advancing care information proposal simplifies requirements firstly. Secondly, it supports patient care. Thirdly, it fulfills the needs for doctors’ practices. To sum up, here are the 4 initial differences between meaningful use and the new replacement:
1- For meaningful use, the healthcare staff had to measure all requirements and report all objectives. Actually, the number of measures for clinical quality is lower with ACI. New advancing care information measures emphasize on HIE and security measures. As well as interoperability. In addition, computerized provider order entry measures and clinical decision support are optional.
2- In ACI, the eligible medical staff can choose which clinical quality measures are most important.
3- With meaningful use, the evaluation of healthcare providers was based on “all-or-nothing”. Now, it has become more flexible.
4- Alignment of ACI with other reporting programs which are absent with meaningful use.
Next steps with this information
Obviously, the Next steps with this information would lead us to the application process. Of course, the first question would be:
What version of ACI should you implement?
MIPS eligible doctors can report the ACI objectives and measures when they obtain:
- The union of certified EHR technologies from editions 2014 and 2015 supporting these measures (like Ambula EHR)
- Or, EHR technology validated the 2015 Edition (like Ambula EHR)
To meet the requirements for each of these measures, you can rely on a validated EHR technology:
- Security Risk analysis
- E-prescribing
- Patient access
- Summary of care
- Accepting and requesting a summary of care
What happened to meaningful use? It got pumped! With its new name (ACI) and updates, you will be able to have the best new technology certified practice. We’ve provided the knowledge you need to become ACI friendly and we put you on the right track.
If you need further information on this subject, kindly contact the Ambula Healthcare team: (818) 308-4108! And now check out how has EMR changed healthcare?
About the Author: Khalil
