By Tim Kaschinske

In late March, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued its proposed rule for Meaningful Use, Stage 3. The mantra for Meaningful Use Stage 3 is to “Simplify and Streamline” by building toward program milestones, reducing complexity and simplifying providers’ reporting. The aim is to help providers improve both health information exchange and healthcare quality by zeroing in on certified technology that supports the electronic health record (EHR).

Over the long term, the goal of Meaningful Use is to improve the way providers are paid, improve the delivery of care and promote the sharing of information. Consequently, this will improve patient care, make healthcare delivery more efficient and promote healthier populations.

While healthcare organizations all agree with the goals of Meaningful Use, many are overwhelmed with the prospect of compliance with Meaningful Use. Healthcare providers should take heart in the fact that, from a technology point of view, the building blocks for Meaningful Use compliance are already available. These building blocks come in the form of standards, such as HL7 and DICOM, as well as in industry initiatives such as the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) integration profile from IHE. It’s up to the healthcare vendors to incorporate these building blocks into their products in order to facilitate the implementation of Meaningful Use.

As part of the simplification of Meaningful Use, Stage 3 reduces the more than 20 objectives down to a core of eight advanced use objectives. Some of the eight are retained Stage 2 objectives with small modifications. Some are objectives with more expanded scope. In all cases, the eight objectives are about the movement of information to support the improvement of healthcare.

BridgeHead’s Contribution to Meaningful Use

As a leader in healthcare data management, BridgeHead Software believes that data interoperability through standards is key to sharing information which supports transparency for consumers, health care providers, and researchers while strengthening decision making.

Last October, BridgeHead introduced HealthStore®, the first Independent Clinical Archive (ICA) for long-term storage, protection and sharing of hospital data. A modular solution, BridgeHead HealthStore utilizes standards to both ingest data into the archive, and to share data contained in the archive with other applications. At its core, HealthStore utilizes XDS, which is defined by IHE as a consistent way of describing data across all data types to help power the patient-centric view.

BridgeHead HealthStore can ingest content in any format: DICOM, HL7 documents, native XDS documents and even unstructured content. All content is then published to the XDS registry at the core of HealthStore, greatly simplifying access to disparate content types. Moreover, as most EHR systems support the XDS web services for accessing data published by XDS, accessing data within HealthStore can be plug and play, utilizing the building blocks defined by XDS. Data that isn’t normally accessible within the EHR can become accessible once it has been archived to HealthStore.

Meaningful Use Now

BridgeHead Software is facilitating Meaningful Use compliance by simplifying the integration of all hospital data into an easily-accessed, standards-based data store. Its improved data interoperability allows providers to standardize access to key elements of the patient record in one repository.

With broader more timely access to data, hospitals are empowering caregivers to improve patient outcomes by providing doctors with the information they need, when they need it. In particular, HealthStore makes it easier for hospitals to view, search and drive more value out of their archive data than ever before. By helping providers access the reports, documents and images that contain the granular data, we’re also facilitating data analytics and the ability for the hospital to make real-time decisions at the point of care.

Find out more about BridgeHead HealthStore.

Read more about the Meaningful Use, Stage 3