Dive Brief:
- At Crossville, TN-based Cumberland Medical Center, health leaders wanted to get ahead with stage 2 meaningful use attestation, setting a goal of collecting the needed data by April 1. To make that happen, they had to create a secure messaging infrastructure allowing the exchange of information between the Center all of their partners, including physician practices, other hospitals nursing homes and home health organizations.
- The team set out to get this done at blazing speed, in less than two weeks. Their intent was to avoid bottlenecks created by working with vendors at the end of the stage 2 cycle, when the vendors would be swamped by competing demands from other facilities.
- Cumberland was able to make this happen by joining its regional HIE and getting fast service from secure messaging vendor DataMotion and EMR vendor Meditech. Meditech managed to complete its upgrade to the 6.0 version of its EMR during this period.
Dive Insight:
Cumberland is an average-sized community hospital of 189 beds, which may have made the vendor implementations a bit easier to do on time. Nonetheless, its leaders deserve a great deal of credit for setting an aggressive meaningful use implementation goal which set it ahead of the pack. There's little doubt that as leaders predicted, they would have had a much harder time getting enough of their vendors attention later in the year, and could even have blown stage 2 deadlines. But having gotten their goals met early, the hospital plans to attest during the third week of July. As the Center's leaders see it, this is a testament to the level of support they got from both their vendors and HIE.