Industry Insight

Survey: Meaningful Use Goals Met, but Potential Unrealized

In a recent survey by HIT consulting firm Stoltenberg Consulting, 70% of respondents noted that, while their organizations have met meaningful use requirements, they haven’t been able to maximize meaningful use’s full potential.

The survey also revealed that lack of resources (50%) is or has been the biggest barrier to achieving meaningful use, followed by restricted time frames (23%), lack of buy-in from their organizations (15%), and competing HIT projects (12%).

Shane Pilcher, vice president of Stoltenberg Consulting, explains that the survey responses reflected what may be organizations’ misunderstanding of what meaningful use is and how it should be approached. “While many organizations may view meaningful use as a must-do regulatory requirement, it is actually much more,” he says. “Organizations need to view meaningful use as a strategy, discipline, and process that facilitates health care transformation and eases transitions to initiatives such as full patient engagement, value-based accountable care, and population health management. On the other hand, organizations most likely to maximize the full potential of meaningful use are those that treat it like a journey that ultimately will secure a future for promising developments such as mobile health, remote monitoring, care collaboration, medical home, population health management, and accountable care.”

The survey identified ICD-10 as the biggest topic in HIT in 2014 (47%), followed by Big Data (27%), EHR implementation (16%), and meaningful use (10%).

Forty percent of responses to the question, “If Big Data is the next best thing, why do many HIT leaders view it as something in the distant future?” indicated that most health care organizations don’t know what to do with all their data.

“Organizations need to understand and differentiate Big Data from the more appropriate smart health care data,” Pilcher says. “Today, they are collecting data that usually gets stored somewhere inside data warehouses in the hopes that it will eventually be used in the next five years or so. If organizations aren’t monitoring what they’re saving, however, the quality and quantity of the data will not be sufficient when they are ready to use it. These organizations might think they have several years of historical data to draw from when they begin their analytics but, in reality, the data is often not the quality, quantity, or type that they need.”

Pilcher emphasizes that “smart health care data is the key—focusing on the type of data they have, the volume of data, and the validity of data. They must make sure that what they’re collecting is what they’re expecting.”

— Source: Stoltenberg Consulting

 

M*Modal Opens Technology Center in India

M*Modal, a provider of clinical documentation services and speech understanding solutions, has opened a dedicated state-of-the-art India Technology Centre.

The 320-seat facility is located at Cessna Business Park in Bengaluru and spans more than 34,000 square feet of office space for more than 250 technology team members, including product developers, quality assurance engineers, natural language processing and speech recognition content developers, technology infrastructure, and technical support professionals.

The new center complements M*Modal’s current international technology centers located in Norcross, Georgia; Pittsburgh; and Franklin, Tennessee, in the United States; and Malvern in the United Kingdom.

The India operations will focus on innovations in existing and emerging health care technologies, particularly in the clinical documentation space. The center also is part of M*Modal’s expansion plans in India to help accelerate overall company growth and create value for its health care provider customers worldwide.

— Source: Pharmabiz.com