Putting It All Together

In early December, Erica Drazen, Sc.D., managing director, and Jane Metzger, principal researcher, in the Waltham, Mass.-based Global Institute for Emerging Healthcare Practices at the Falls Church, Va.-based CSC, released a new research report, “Ten Principles for Hospitals To Align Meaningful Use with Healthcare Reform.”

Assisted by colleagues Jordan Battani and Caitlin Lorincz, Drazen and Metzger examined in depth some of the data reporting and other issues implicated in the overlap between numerous healthcare reform-driven programs and the meaningful use process under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act/Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (ARRA-HITECH) legislation. Citing the value-based purchasing program, the shared savings program for accountable care organizations, the readmissions reduction program, the healthcare-acquired conditions reduction program, and the bundled payments for care improvement initiative, the authors write in their report that “In this new world, performance matters a great deal. Payment adjustments for VBP and RRP [value-based payment and readmissions reduction programs] begin in FY 2013. By 2015, 4.5 percent of Medicare revenue will be at risk (not including the additional adjustments for the HAC initiative, for which rules are still pending and potential also from the ACO program). In contrast, HITECH meaningful use puts up to 75 percent of the market basket adjustment at risk in FY 2016 and beyond.”

Given such risks, Drazen, Metzger and their colleagues posit what they consider to be 10 principles “for aligning today’s work on HIT with the requirements of the future.” These 10 are:

> Never short-change patient safety
> Ensure the minimum data set
> Put CPOE to work immediately
> Close the medication loop
>  Move measurement to real time
> Focus patient engagement on high-risk patients
> Go beyond testing with health information exchange (HIE)
>  Invest in internal integration
>  Throw the book at readmissions
>  Consider HITECH the floor, not the ceiling

Following their articulation of these 10 principles, the report’s authors go into considerable depth on each principle, gathering together facts from the healthcare reform and HITECH legislation, and connecting those facts with the underlying strategic and tactical implications for providers.

For example, in the readmissions-related section of the report, the authors note that, “Because of the high stakes, work on many HIT capabilities required for HITECH should be focused on patients at risk of readmission. HIT,” they point out, “can provide a critical linkage in new joint programs with medical groups that are heavy admitters of Medicare or other high-risk patients and/or with nursing homes or rehab hospitals to which at-risk patients are discharged. HIE and patient engagement capabilities of HITECH meaningful use are obvious tools to employ in this effort, but so are electronic patient tracking and clinical decision support,” they note. “Readmissions are emerging as the first real test of care coordination in operation, and every hospital will need to leverage HIT effectively to gain a passing grade.”

Shortly after publication of the report, Jane Metzger spoke with HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland regarding its implications for healthcare and healthcare IT leaders. Below are excerpts from that interview.

Healthcare IT leaders are trying to manage what seems these days like countless priorities.

Yes, and CMS [the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] keeps coming out with new pieces of value-based purchasing, which makes things hard to keep up with. HITECH is very time-sensitive, and you’ve got to keep up with that; so the danger is that you just think of keeping up with HITECH as the goal, and you run the danger of not really moving the organization towards the future payment environment, where performance is everything. So we actually came up with three different tactics for aligning the HITECH with healthcare reform—which is really payment reform.

Jane Metzger

What are the top three things they have to do?