Dive Brief:
- In his opening keynote at the recent CHIME HIT Leader 3.0 LEAD Forum in Boston, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, heavily criticized CMS' new proposal for the meaningful use program, calling it "431 pages of the kitchen sink."
- Halamka pointed to "drastic inconsistency" on the key "view, download and transmit" measure. The draft rule proposes to reduce the requirement that providers have 5% of their patients use technology to electronically download, view and transmit their medical record—to just a single patient. But, the proposed rule for stage 3 requires providers show they use the measure with 25% of patients.
- "These thresholds for stage 3 are too high," Halamka said. "That rule must be rewritten from scratch. It needs to be wildly slimmed down."
Dive Insight:
The proposal, which is open for public comment until May 29, has drawn its fair share of criticism from both sides of the argument. At HIMSS, former federal health IT coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari broke the code of silence by saying that the proposed rule should be withdrawn. He called on patients to demonstrate to the agency that there is demand for data access by asking their providers for electronic copies of their health records. Rasu Shrestha, UPMC's chief innovation officer and president of its Technology Development Center, told Healthcare Dive that he thought the provision was a "misstep."
Halamka also spoke to the unlikely possibility of a national patient ID system. Although CHIME has promoted a national patient identifier system, Halamka remains skeptical as Congress has consistently refused to fund it.
"Um, not going to happen," Halamka said. "Maybe we can get a voluntary opt-in patient ID system."