My Plan To Blow Up Meaningful Use And Make It Useful

If you live, work, touch healthcare IT, then your world has been dominated for the past 3-5 years with something called Meaningful Use. The concept is a good one. The government gave $36 billion of "shovel ready" (Sorry, I just love the irony of the shovel ready stimulus being only half spent 5 years later) stimulus money for Electronic Health Records (EHR) and wanted to make sure that doctors would actually be "meaningful users" of the EHR software. Where this falls apart is that much of meaningful or that many of the meaning has already been achieved.

While many took in the self attestation based meaningful use stage 1, I think it's more than safe to say that meaningful use stage 2 is backed into a corner on the ropes with many providers choosing to opt out from the all the extra hoops that meaningful use stage 2 requires. The incentive money they're getting for MU stage 2 just doesn't match the effort that's required to jump through all of the MU stage 2 requirements. Even the coming EHR penalties aren't enough to convince many from getting out of the meaningful use rate race completely.

What's also clear is that doctors do want to use technology to improve the care they provide their patients...