It’s clear that Stage 2 Meaningful Use is set to transform patient engagement, but will it limit the way physicians interact with their patients?
While Stage 2 rules intend to emphasize the physician-patient relationship, some insist the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) could do a little more. An online petition on Change.org, for instance, urged the ONC to further bolster their patient engagement requirements, stating:
“Nothing would result in improving the health of the population (and decrease healthcare costs) more than having greater involvement/engagement by individuals in the healthcare process.”
Nevertheless, some would argue that current Meaningful Use rules result in patient engagement limitations. We’ve cited a few Meaningful Use patient engagement inconsistencies below.
Will Enough Patients Use Secure Messaging?
For instance, although doctors are required under Meaningful Use Stage 2 rules to use secure messaging to communicate with patients on relevant health information, there are still patients who don’t have access to the Internet or face too steep a learning curve to do so successfully.
Not to mention, while providers can engage in secure messaging among colleagues, how can they guarantee that the required 10% of their patients meet the same security requirement? How can doctors even entice these patients to do so?
Patient Education Challenges
Hurdles in the way educational patient materials are transmitted can also affect members of the patient population, particularly those who aren’t computer savvy or read at too low a level to understand the literature on their symptomatology.
Conversely, only requiring that doctors provide 50% of their patient population with their health information is another patient engagement limitation. Every patient should, in theory, have access to his or her own personal health data.
Patient Demographics Limitations
First question: should recording disability status be optional or mandatory? While doctors do not have to include it now under MU patient engagement requirements – and providing this option retroactively could result in a burden for EHR vendors – recording of disability can help providers improve care coordination in a large number of scenarios.
On another note, not noting sexual orientation on the patient record can be detrimental to one’s patient population. According to a 2011 report published by the Institute of Medicine, collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity through EHRs would help address health issues among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations. The same study recommended this become a MU requirement as well.
However, this kind of sensitive information is fraught with difficulty. For instance, defining disability status invites the influence of various gray areas, while collecting sensitive data regarding sexual preference seems rather difficult, especially when considering the challenges providers have faced under Stage 1 MU rules requiring the reporting of ethnicity for over 50% of their patients.
Do you know what you need when setting up a new medical practice?
