I am very excited this week to present with my colleague Dave Schoolcraft at MGMA in Las Vegas. We have two presentations on Tuesday, the first at 10:15 entitled the Legal Aspects of Meeting Patient Engagement, the second at 2:45 entitled Double Dipping for EHR Funding.
Vegas is all about the money, and Double Dipping for EHR Funding will focus on how physician practices can still obtain money for Electronic Health Record systems. The presentation will focus on Stark/Anti-Kickback Donation Arrangements and Meaningful Use dollars. If you are looking to upgrade to 2014 CEHRT this is a presentation you don’t want to miss. Prior to joining our presentation, I suggest reading two articles we published earlier in the year: Understanding Stark/Anti-Kickback Compliant EHR Donation Arrangements and Key Lessons Related to Stark Compliant EHR Donation Arrangements.
As for Legal Aspects of Meeting Patient Engagement – this presentation focuses both on HIPAA Compliance and Meaningful Use. Stage 2 Meaningful Use includes five patient engagement related objectives, and this time CMS means business. Two of these five objectives include measures requiring that at least 5% of patients take an action. These five measures makes the implementation and use of patient portals essential, as portals are a key means of communication with patients and is an appropriate mechanism for each of these Meaningful Use objectives.
The relevant patient engagement Meaningful Use objectives I am referring to here include:
- Provide patients the ability to view online, download and transmit their health information within four business days of the information being available to the EP. Included in this measure is the requirement that at least 5% of unique patients view, download or transmit their healthcare information.
- Provide clinical summaries for patients for each office visit.
- Use clinically relevant information to identify patients who should receive reminders for preventive/follow-up care and send these patients the reminders, per patient preference.
- Use clinically relevant information from Certified EHR Technology to identify patient-specific education resources and provide those resources to the patient.
- Use secure electronic messaging to communicate with patients on relevant health information. Included in this measure is that at least 5% of unique patients send an email to the EP/practice.
I have added links to the CMS Eligible Professional Specification Sheets for Stage 2 above because I find them very helpful in deciphering what each of these measures require. Meeting these requirements is not a walk in the park, and my clients have expressed difficulty getting patients to send secure messages or login to a portal. Often the CEHRT itself makes these tasks quite difficult. Patient engagement is core to growing a practice, especially as patients begin to pay for their healthcare and start to demand physician interaction via e-mail and other technologies.
If you are interested in learning more about these patient engagement requirements in Meaningful Use stop on by our presentation, or contact me directly.
