Recently, Andy Slavitt, the CMS acting administrator, announced that CMS will likely end the Meaningful Use program this year.
Does that mean that the hopes of an internetworked healthcare system that’s able to seamlessly share health information are completely dashed before interoperability truly got off the ground?
The answer to that question remains to be seen.
As a software vendor that works with some of the largest hospitals to solve data management problems that typically arise due to a lack of data interoperability, our experience suggests that our healthcare system has a long way to go to achieve interoperability for the preponderance of medical records.
While the future of health information interoperability is unknown, without hard requirements and deadlines emplaced either through market forces or government mandates, this announcement foreshadows a future where advances made toward seamless information sharing between independent healthcare providers will come more slowly than the meaningful use timescale determined.
If your organization is tired of waiting for interoperability to happen and you want to learn how to get discrete clinical data out of unstructured text documents and into the EMR, watch this On Demand Webinar with University of Wisconsin Health Clinical Systems Manager, Becky Schroder, MT (ASCP) speaking about their experience working with Extract Systems to automate data extraction from unstructured medical records.
