care entities and public health au- thorities,
• Redesign of workflows within health care settings to gain quality and ef- ficient benefits of EHRs, and
• EHR transition while ensuring privacy and security of medical information.
Melinda Teel, RHIA, CCS, program
director and instructor for Midland’s HITECH Workforce Program, says pro- grams available through the Community College Consortia offer intense curricula that quickly prepare students for the HIT workforce.
Curriculum developers include Duke University, University of Alabama, Or- egon Health Sciences University, Co- lumbia University, and Johns Hopkins University. Ms. Teel says graduates of Midland College’s program can:
• Communicate well with EHR vendors to meet the practice’s needs,
• Identify any problems with the EHR system and address them,
• Build reports and analyze data from the EHR for medical specialties, and
• Successfully implement an EHR. “Midland College’s HITECH Workforce
Program provides cross training for IT and health care professionals. If we talk the same language, we can be more ef- ficient and can communicate our needs better. That doesn’t always happen now,” Ms. Teel said. Grant funds make it possible for Mid-
land College to offer 100-percent tuition reimbursement for students who suc- cessfully complete the program in six months. Each certificate costs only $400. At press time, Midland College had
enrolled more than 100 participants in its program, and seven had graduated. Ms. Teel says prospective students can enroll for Sept. 6 and Sept. 30 start dates to take advantage of 100-percent tuition reimbursement under the federal grant.
The American Medical Association and 37 medical societies sent a letter to the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) in response to the Health IT Pol- icy Committee’s request for comments on the proposed next stage of meaning- ful use criteria. The letter urged great- er flexibility in meeting the electronic health record (EHR) incentive program requirements to allow more physicians to successfully participate. “Physicians are working hard to adopt
EHRs into their practices, and inflexible incentive program requirements will only hinder the health IT transitions under way today,” said AMA Board Sec- retary Steven J. Stack, MD. “Unrealistic Stage 2 requirements will overly burden physicians and hamper adoption — es- pecially for those physicians in small or solo practice.” A key barrier to health IT adoption
is much of the infrastructure and many tools required to achieve the optimal level of interoperability and information sharing among health care professionals still need to be built. “The AMA is committed to helping physicians successfully adopt EHRs and qualify for federal incentives. To make this a reality, the requirements for partic- ipation must be realistic and attainable,” said Dr. Stack. AMA and the other groups proposed a list of actions to be taken to help maxi- mize physician participation in the in- centive programs. Actions include:
• Conduct a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and ONC survey of physicians who are and are not par- ticipating in Stage 1 of the incentive program to identify barriers to and solutions for physician participation before moving to Stage 2;
• Provide physicians with the opportu- nity to exclude measures for meeting
July 2011 TEXAS MEDICINE 61
AMA urges flexibility in meeting EHR meaningful use requirements
meaningful use that do not apply to their routine practice;
• Remove any measure that requires adherence from a party that is not a physician;
• Eliminate the high reporting thresh- olds for objectives that can’t currently be met due to the lack of available tools or health information exchang- es; and
• Assess each measure from Stage 1 be- fore moving it to Stage 2 to ensure each is relevant and needed.
To read the AMA letter, visit www
.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/ mm/399/comments-hitpc-proposed- measures-25feb2011.pdf. n
Crystal Conde is associate editor of Texas Medicine. You can reach her by telephone at (800) 880-1300, ext. 1385, or (512) 370-1385; by fax at (512) 370-1629; or by email at
crystal.conde@
texmed.org.
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