The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wants to evaluate certification and testing of electronic health records and is asking healthcare providers to weigh in on the issue.
From McKnight’s:
Among the questions are “how often to require recertification, the number of clinical quality measures to which a certified Health IT Module should be certified, and ways to improve testing of certified Health IT Module(s),” Kate Goodrich, M.D., M.H.S., Director, Center for Clinical Standards & Quality, CMS, wrote in a blog post.
In partnership with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the agency released a request for information on Dec. 30, titled “Certification Frequency and Requirements for the Reporting of Quality Measures under CMS Programs.”
“We are working diligently to improve the means for information exchange and electronic data sharing across and among providers and health systems, increase opportunities for stakeholders to provide feedback, and enhance mechanisms for the capturing of clinical information in EHRs, registries, and other systems to assist with quality reporting and care coordination,” Goodrich wrote.
The pressure for long-term care to increase its quality measurements through hard data grew consistently in 2015. In the nursing home portion of the 2015 “National Impact Assessment of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Quality Measures Report,” released in March, providers were encouraged to consider “development of proactive validation of electronic clinical quality measure/electronic health record data by establishing front-end edits and clinical algorithms appropriate to a given measure.”
The Request for Information was posted in the Federal Register on December 31st, and the comment period will last 30 days.
Photo by Christian Schnettelker via Flickr CC License
