2,246 Eligible Professionals and 100 Hospitals Successfully Attest to Meaningful Use

The Meaningful Use Analysis presented at the recent HIT Policy Committee Meeting indicates that 2,246 Eligible Professionals and 100 Hospitals have attested successfully. That’s a good start to EHR Adoption; with Stage 2 potentially delayed for these earlier adopters it will be interesting to see how many more attest to Meaningful Use in 2011.

Speaking of EHR Adoption, of those attesting I wonder how many different strategies are being used to get there; are they ripping and replacing older technologies for the newer (and supposedly easier to use) integrate systems? Upgrading and adding new products that pull together patient data to create the patient story in a useful way for clinicians? Or something else I’m not thinking of?

What I am pretty sure of is the fact that there are many more clinicians logging into EHRs than there were 6 months ago; so how is this being managed by the IT Department and Practice Managers? Are those incentive dollars received just going back into funding the support of managing applications, workstations and end user logins/passwords? I hope not, and for those of you who have not attested yet, that’s something to think about, where are your incentive dollars going?

If meaningful use incentive dollars can fund your upgrade or move to a new system that’s great, but what about the ongoing costs of maintaining the system? Making No Click Access^®and Single Sign-On part of your EHR adoption will ensure your incentive dollars are not wasted on supportability and increase your clinician adoption to the technologies you are rolling out. In fact, a recent study by the Ponemon Institute found that single sign-on can save clinicians over 15 minutes per day and healthcare organizations over $2M per year.