Meaningful Use : A journey towards Healthcare Enterprise Performance Management
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) has authorized incentive payments through Medicare and Medicaid to clinicians and hospitals when they use EHRs privately and securely to achieve specified improvements in care delivery. Also HITECH goal is not adoption alone but using EHRs in a meaningful way by the providers to achieve significant improvements in care.
The legislation encourages and gives an opportunity to entire provider community to use ARRA MU mandates as a catalyst to reorganize their processes, systems and take a holistic path to move in the direction of enterprise performance. The current MU guidelines focus attention on the role of "meaningful use" in reducing healthcare costs and enhancing care outcomes. However realization of such value, is critically dependent on the ability of care delivery organizations to successfully overcome process, adoption and implementation challenges to be on a high performance growth path.
With the objective of improving clinical outcomes and reducing the healthcare costs, the MU mandates should be considered as an opportunity and trigger for catapulting the hospitals into taking an integrated view of their clinical, operational and financial indicators and move towards Healthcare Enterprise Performance Management (HEPM). This approach shifts the focus beyond mere compliance and reporting to performance monitoring and continuous learning. HEPM provides comprehensive approach towards Meaningful Use that encompasses people, process and technology aspects of MU.
It focuses on an integrated view of clinical, operational and financial metrics (which goes beyond the MU metrics) as well as their inter-relationships with different processes, roles, process owners and helps establish accountability with better control over performance.
It induces business process optimization and allows the enterprise to leverage synergies across various healthcare IT initiatives like EHR implementation, ICD 10 migration, ACO, BI etc. HEPM emphasizes strongly on end user training and sustained adoption advocating a high performance culture and facilitates measuring benefits realization from Meaningful Use and other initiatives in dollar terms. This in turn enables the provider executives in justifying the benefits from Healthcare IT and analytics investments.
In a nut shell HEPM approach looks beyond the Meaningful Use reporting, motivates provider organizations to achieve high performance levels and builds synergies across various healthcare IT initiatives with MU as a catalyst.
