Mastering Data Management

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Penny offers five tips for enabling information sharing beyond a file cabinet

A recent article in Becker's Hospital Review: 5 Tips on Preparing to Meet Meaningful Use Regulations piqued my interest. The five tips make a lot of sense to me, especially after speaking with many Initiate customers who are in the process of implementing their own HIE infrastructures to connect internal systems and the referring physician community.

As a tie in to these five tips, I've identified how meeting meaningful use is supported by an enterprise master person indexes (EMPI) of patients and providers and a Software as a Service (SaaS) based intelligent information sharing platform.

1) Focus on the long term: Implementing an enterprise master person index (EMPI) at the foundation of your EMR initiative will help you meet long term meaningful use requirements by enabling accurate patient and provider identification when accessing and sharing information.

2) Build pockets of connectivity: It is important to connect EMRs over time to eventually grow into a connected community. Initiate Exchange is a software as a service (SaaS) intelligent information sharing platform that helps healthcare organizations rapidly connect EMRs and enable meaningful exchange of information including ePrescribing, ordering and results sharing.

3) Plan for staged deadlines: Going back to the thought of focusing on the long term, meaningful use requirements increase over time. It's important to lay a technical foundation that is scalable and extensible to support increasing information sharing and integration requirements. Your solution should support near and long term objectives by easily integrating into existing environments and supporting new technology

4) Look at your existing quality reporting process: Because quality reporting will be an integral part of meeting meaningful use requirements, it is more important than ever to improve the quality of data to ensure reports can be created quickly and accurately.

5) Choose a vendor that will help you get to meaningful use: Implement technology at the foundation that integrates with all types of systems to ensure that your EMRs are highly integrated and that information can be securely shared. This architecture will get you to meaningful use.

Read how one Initiate customer, UMass Memorial Health Care, profiled in KMWorld is going to meet meaningful use requirements without specifically planning to meet meaningful use requirements. UMass Memorial Health Care is a typical academic medical center serving a tightly knit community in Worcester, MA. They are connecting internal systems and community providers to drive efficiencies into the system and at the same time, improve quality of care. You can also watch their video case study.