The Health Care RFID Blog

With the fast-approaching December 31 deadline for HITECH’s issuance of “meaningful use” standards for incentive-eligible health care technologies (including electronic health records [EHRs]),  an advisory board to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is making the case for measurement. This definition of meaningful use will influence, among other things, the technologies that will be implemented in the provider setting and the types of standards used for healthcare exchange to qualify for ARRA stimulus dollars.

Earlier this month, the advisory group, The National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), submitted recommendations to  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius urging that in addition to those standards being defined, it is critical that they be comparatively measureable.   These recommendations are based largely upon observations made during an October NCVHS hearing where public and private sector experts  shared thoughts on how to incorporate meaningful metrics into the complex quality measurement environment.

Among the Committee’s observations was that numerous testifying experts stated that existing EHR systems do not easily produce quality reports as required by various reporting initiatives, nor sufficient to meet incentive criteria.  Disparate data definitions and capture methods complicate data aggregation and reporting for providers, and, therefore, muddy the certification requirements for EHR vendors, according to the panel. Because EHRs would provide healthcare professionals with electronic access to an individual’s medical history, even when that history has been recorded by multiple providers, it is critical that a national EHR system supports inter-operable communication of standardized data between hospitals and physicians.

While the Committee did not outline specific technology solutions to meet this challenge, we at Dynamic have given the topic much consideration. In fact, as champions of RFID health care solutions, we feel like practicality and practice are, at last, shaking hands. Initially, RFID could represent a faster and less complex implementation of EHRs, and longer-term could provide the mechanism that ensures proper database alignment with each patient, striking at the heart of data integrity and comparability concerns.  

There are numerous ways RFID technology  can contribute to the development of EHRs and ensure their compliance with meaningful use compliance:

·         Improving quality, safety, efficiency and reducing health disparities, which for example, might require lab results to be incorporated into an EHR as structured data.

·         Engaging patients and families by providing these parties with access to data and tools to make informed decisions.

·         Improving care coordination by allowing information to be shared among varying physician groups

We know that RFID could play an important role in the development of EHRs, particularly given the initially tight – and increasingly narrow — timeframe established. There are many hurdles to clear before EHRs are a national and industry standard, including serious decision making about data, security and reporting protocol.  A careful exploration of RFID’s uses and benefits in an EHR scenario could move the decision about data capture along with relative ease.

Tags: EHRs, health care IT, Health Care RFID, health IT, meaningful use, prevent hais with rfid, RFID, rfid asset tracking

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Auto-Capture Technologies, Health Care IT News, Health Care RFID, Health Care Technology, Improving Patient Care, Minimizing Health Care Risks, Preventing HAIs, Reducing Health Care Costs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.