Meaningful Use

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is now accepting applications for potential membership for two new health IT federal advisory committee workgroups focused on patient engagement.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released the Health IT Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan, which builds on the Department’s overall commitment to patient safety.

The United States Healthcare Information Knowledgebase (USHIK) has added recently published information on meaningful use clinical quality measures and their associated value sets as well as the meaningful use core and menu objectives.

The Office for the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) has updated its Health IT Dashboard to include from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs public use files. The Meaningful Use dashboard is there to act as an interactive supplement to CMS’ public use data and reports using the ONC’s Health IT Dashboard framework as the starting point, the government announced this week.

According to a report from researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which is affiliated with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the number of office-based physicians using electronic health records (EHRs) has risen steadily since the 2009 enactment of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). The report, “Use and Characteristics of Electronic Health Record Systems Among Office-based Physician Practices: United States, 2001-2012,” says that 72 percent of office-based physicians used any electronic medical record (EMR) or EHR systems, up from 48 percent in 2009.