The Stage 1 Meaningful Use criteria include the reporting of quality measures as core requirements for both hospitals and eligible professionals. Hospitals have to report on 15 quality metrics while eligible professionals must report on 6 measures. While Stage 1 only requires the reporting (not performance) on these specific metrics, the challenge is found in the actual data that must be captured for the quality metrics. There are many data elements that are “hidden”.
More than 25% of the needed data for the hospital quality measures come from physician documentation – which is not required for Stage 1 and is typically not automated. In addition, the information is often in free text form rather than coded. An eligible professional meeting all other requirements for Stage 1 Meaningful Use will only attain 48% of the data elements needed for the quality reporting of the practice.
Avery Partners Healthcare provides services to assist hospitals and eligible professional address this challenge. A detailed analysis of data capture is done where every element is identified to determine if it is captured? How is it captured? Where is it captured? Is it captured and stored in the system? If so, is it a structured data element or free text?
Once these questions have been answered a gap analysis is done to determine the remediation required from a data, process, workflow and policy standpoint. A roadmap is developed to address the deficiencies and implement an automation workplan. Additional services can include assistance in specific measure specifications to determine which patients to include in the population, which patients to exclude from a particular measure and which data elements are needed per measure to determine the outcome. The timeframe of these services range from 1 to 8 weeks.