Report: EHRs will capture only a minority of meaningful use data

Hospitals seeking to meet quality reporting requirements in the final rule for the first stage of "meaningful use" of electronic health records will face a number of hidden data capture requirements, states a report from Computer Sciences Corp.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act--passed into law as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009--included incentive payments to health care providers to adopt EHRs, provided they make meaningful use of the technology. The Health and Human Services Department estimates that the incentive payments will total between $9.7 billion and $27.4 billion over a decade. HHS released the final rule governing standards of stage 1 meaningful use (later stages will get their own rules) on July 13 and the final rule for EHR standards and certification on July 28.

Included among the requirements of meaningful use for hospitals are 15 clinical quality measures which must be electronically reported by 2012. But merely meeting the functional requirements of a stage 1 EHR will capture only 35 percent of the data elements necessary to report the 15 quality measures, the CSC paper states.

The remaining 65 percent of the data elements depends in great part on data not captured today in a easily reportable form, such as physician documentation, the report states. That information usually exists today as free-form text rather than structured data. Medications administered to patients also are a large lacuna, it adds. Capturing both physician documentation and medication administration is further complicated by the fact that some of that information can easily come from an emergency department or surgical suite, places where the time and capacity for structured data entry have been limited.

The report tells hospitals to expect future stages of meaningful use to include more quality measures and even direct electronic quality reporting from EHRs.

For more:
- download the CSC report (.pdf)
- go to the for Medicare & Medicaid Services webpage on meaningful use or the HHS page on EHR standards and certification

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