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Cloud Promotion Through Meaningful Use 3

By 05.07.15
Reading time: 2 minutes

The recent introduction of Meaningful Use 3 presented a lot of the same, or clarifications of the past. However, it also demonstrated a sincere desire to learn from prior mistakes and offer opportunities to make the goals of meaningful use more achievable.

In doing so, it appears that CMS is recognizing that by further expanding the manner and type of technology that can meet the standards, the program will ultimately undergo more significant success. It’s not just about EHRs. Its about technology that can drive results in critical areas proven to improve patient health: Care Coordination, Patient Engagement, and Population Management to name a few.

To levelset, there are eight main advanced use objectives as outlined by CMS1:

  1. Protect electronic health information
  2. e-Prescribing
  3. Clinical decision support
  4. Computerized provider order entry
  5. Patient electronic access to their data
  6. Coordination of care through patient engagement
  7. Health information exchange
  8. Public health reporting

What’s most intriguing to me is that underlying these key objectives, is another very clear theme – making the transfer/sharing of patient data more efficient and comprehensive – made possible by robust APIs (the ability to leverage a pre-built protocol to access/share prescribed sets of data between systems; interoperability at its most efficient level).

The objectives that have been continually identified, and further refined in MU3, are areas in which cloud technologies have been actively providing solutions.

Healthcare organizations seeking to transform in order to meet MU standards, evolve with changing reimbursement guidelines, and deliver better care, must look at cloud technology as a viable option.

Why is this? Cloud technology, such as Salesforce, offers robust functionality, on a scalable platform, that is mobile ready and highly configurable to bring forward the time to value. This drives organizations towards better process automation and efficiency, and ultimately provides a framework to roll-out better services and applications for both patient/provider facing activities, but also internal business operations.

In working with healthcare organizations, we have demonstrated how to solve components of MU by making the platform serve as an engagement layer, while coordinating the data flow across various systems.

This has been accomplished with such solution components as:

  • Robust scheduling capabilities to coordinate activities across multiple locations and channels (self-service, Web, app, and call center)
  • Enhanced customer service through clinical and non-clinical data context for patient interactions
  • Integrations with wearables, connected devices, and external systems such as EHRs and Practice Management Systems
  • Storage of patient communication preferences
  • Frameworks to send ADT messages across a local, regional, or state level
  • Tracking treatment plans and progress notes
  • Portals for patients, providers, family members and other business partners to have greater information transparency, collaboration, and seamlessness across episodes of care
  • Streamlined referral management activities
  • Patient “journeys” to track not not only clinical interactions, but coordinate touchpoints about their diagnoses or future activities

The dial is moving in the direction of cloud technology as CMS and other institutions reinforce its capabilities as a viable solution framework.

If you want to learn more about how Silverline may be able to assist your efforts in achieving the goals of MU through a cloud platform, send a request here

If you want more details on the proposed changes, there is a great document on Healthit.gov, that explains how they have been adjusted.

1According to the article “CMS Lays out vision for Stage 3 meaningful use

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