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Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | April 27, 2015
From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Quick turnaround
Health IT companies are also struggling to meet the federal government’s demands. Mark Segal, vice president of government and industry affairs for GE Healthcare, who also serves as the chair of the EHR Association, says companies have been struggling with creating products that are certified for Meaningful Use, but also meet customers’ needs.
“The process of standardizing things through Meaningful Use and certification can have that downside of changing the way people have been doing things in their practices,” Segal says. “We have to balance the regulatory requirements while being mindful within those constraints of the usability of our products.”
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For example, GE is looking to streamline clinical visit summaries, which in some cases were not as usable as desired, or provided more information than the clinician or patient wanted included. Segal says the company is working on making the clinical visit summaries more usable; that is, briefer, and organized in a way that better meets physicians’ and patients’ needs.
CMS is expected to soon put out requirements for Stage 3 of Meaningful Use and Segal says EHR and other heath IT developers are looking to increase the time available to put out the best product. The general opinion in the industry is that companies should have 18 months from when the final regulations, as well as all associated guidance and certification test scripts, are out, to when the products need to be released. “In practice, it was much less than that for Stage 2,” Segal says.
That compressed timing, as well as extensive and prescriptive requirements, has an impact on usability, and what ends up getting prioritized by companies is what needs to be done to be certified for Meaningful Use, with less focus on what customers are asking for, including usability of the product. “Give customers time to really digest what has come out in Stages 1 and 2, and room for developers to focus on customer-prioritized functionality,” Segal says.
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