Stage 3 of meaningful use may seem a long way off. After all, the Stage 2 final rule has yet to be released. Yet for members of the Meaningful Use Work Group of the federal Health IT Policy Committee, deadlines are fast approaching. They are working to make initial Stage 3 recommendations by Aug. 1, so that a Request for Comment can by issued in November and final recommendations can be published by May 2013. At the July 3 meeting of the Meaningful Use Work Group, Paul Tang, M.D., the group’s chair, led committee members through discussion of several concepts the work group may propose, including improved care coordination.  Charlene Underwood, director of government and industry affairs at Siemens Medical, led a subgroup’s work on care coordination. She described the model for a platform that would move providers in the direction of a shared electronic whiteboard. “We think that by Stage 3, we need to begin to transition from a venue-specific orientation to a more patient-centric solution,” she said. Underwood described it as a fundamental step toward implementing the Affordable Care Act.  The committee is considering proposing that to meet the criteria for Stage 3 meaningful use, both hospitals and providers must implement a solution that:

• Tracks individual care goals;
• Records care team members, their roles, and their contact information across care settings;
• Tracks tasks/steps and responsible party;
• Feeds population health management;
• Facilitates reconciliation of medications, problem lists, goals, and plan of care; and
• Allows for input and viewing by all care team members, the patient and their caregivers. 

The potential measures would be:

• A platform for collaborative care exists and is being used for at least 20 percent of patients.
• Receiving care team members in a care transition access information for at least 10 percent of patients having an active collaborative care plan. 

Tang noted that this is the kind of preamble that all Stage 3 measure recommendations should have. “It offers a vision and a strategy for how Stage 3 addresses the new care delivery model,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing we want to up right up front for all Stage 3 recommendations.”