Home Forums Discussions Meaningful Use Or pay $10k and $500 a month and get this

This information is from HIS talk. "GE Healthcare. Says Centricity Practice and EMR can?t generate accurate Meaningful Use reports. See link here to its letter to customers.? It sounds like basic technical stuff, made interesting only because the company admits that there could be problems for clients who have already attested ? the corrected reports may show that they didn?t hit the required thresholds after all . GE says they will provide ?further instruction on how to work with CMS related to any changes related to attestation.? The recommend changes in practice are: (a) choose specific race/ethnicity codes instead of free text and don?t choose ?multi-racial,? ?Hispanic,? or ?other;? (b) use specific options for describing smoking status; and (c) us prescribing to measure patient medication education since issuing handouts that the EMR did not suggest doesn?t count toward Meaningful use. I don?t see any of this as a slam on GEHC other than they are awfully late in identifying the problems, which seem pretty obvious. Let?s hope the triggering event wasn?t an eligible provider getting in trouble with CMS."

From the article and from the letter to providers from Centricity/GE.

This is in no way against anyone doing MU, and I certainly understand the motivation behind it, but how does this have anything to do with Meaningful Use? Technicalities such as prescribing vs handouts qualifying for meaningful use. Notice the misspelling from GE after (c) below.

The other irony is Centricity is heads and above the worse EMR ever designed. Ask Adam who was forced to use it in residency. Practices working under EMHS took over two months to get through the learning curve. Doctors forced to use it would come up to me and tell me they wished they could use AC. An ED report using Centricity for an ear infection, averages four pages and the only intent of the EMR and its production of the note is to cover every single base of E & M coding. That is not a bad idea, but it comes at the expensve of good patient communication.

a) choose specific race/ethnicity codes instead of free text and don?t choose ?multi-racial,? ?Hispanic,? or ?other;? (b) use specific options for describing smoking status; and (c) us prescribing to measure patient medication education since issuing handouts that the EMR did not suggest doesn?t count toward Meaningful use.


Demographics (Race/Ethnicity). Train providers how to categorize patients' race and ethnicity according to Federal guidelines, using one of the 5 major categories for race and 2 endorsed
categories for ethnicity, listed in the documentation below. Do not use "Multi-racial" for race, but instead enter the appropriate combination of the 5 endorsed categories as custom text (e.g. "White/Black"). Do not select the options "Hispanic" or "Other" for race. Select "Undetermined" for race or "Other or Undetermined" for ethnicity exclusively to indicate that the patient has declined to

We all know this stuff is crap. I have a patient whose mom is white and dad is black. Is that kid categorized as white or black? I have no clue. It's stupid.

I did MU this year. The handouts and patient print outs are just stupid. So use an EMR so you can be paperless, but then use $10,000 worth of toner/paper to print it all out for the patient who quickly throws it in the trash. We just ask the patient if the want a printed copy, an emailed copy, or no copy. Most want nothing. They just want to be taken care of. What a concept.

Anyway, when I attested for MU, the didn't even ask for my reports from AC. AC does a pretty decent job of having that data for you to plug into the online attestation though. It took me less than an hour one day to do it all.

Travis is back, and I love the guy.

I love him, too. I do want to point out that I didn't put this here to inspire another thread of rants which point out the foolishness of MU; that is too easy a target. MY point was that an EMR produced by one of the biggest companies in the world, which is used by 10x as many people as AC and costs 5x as much as AC STILL has major problems like this. Different, but arguably worse than prescription writer slowing.

Well, historically in the USA, that child is considered Black.

Oh, don't get me started on GE. I had their ASP EMR (medicalogic encounter) in the late 1990s. They pulled the plug on it because it wasn't profitable and left the doctors high and dry (well they offered some token 25% discount off their like $40,000 product).

Was that Logician Internet and then Medscape Encounter?

Yes. The product was way ahead of it's time.

Notwithstanding what you said, and it was terrible, Logician Internet at $100 a month was a really cool EMR. It still, to this day, made the mess progress note as well as formatting every. The drill down wasn't bad, and I loved the way it auto-coded.

The problem is that anything and everything that Medscape touches turns to crap. eMedicine was a great resource until Medscape got involved. Not, it is hideous.