The Importance of Well-Defined Meaningful Use Requirements

Past blogs have focused on the need for a Meaningful Use road map—an easy to follow path to implementing Meaningful Use and achieving the benefit of Medicare/Medicaid incentives. For Meaningful Use to be effective, public health departments need to create clear requirements that hospitals, eligible professionals, and urgent care centers can easily meet.

A recent article on Modern Healthcare shows that this is often not the case—resulting in fewer-than-expected numbers of hospitals meeting Meaningful Use requirements. This highlights the importance of well-defined requirements to healthcare providers. For public health Meaningful Use criteria—and specifically syndromic surveillance—this is a key aspect to project success.

Read more about the missed opportunity of Meaningful Use—specifically in the amount of Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements lost—in the article EHR Payments Accelerate For Docs, Slow for Hospitals.