Brookings Institution - Failure of Meaningful Use Program: Why and how to save it |

Meaningful Use Program: Why it failed and how to save it | Brookings Institution
Although policymakers' hunch about the benefits of IT was correct, it failed to understand a nuanced condition under which this magic wand works: organic and voluntary adoption. Imposing these records on the medical community and forcing them to adopt and use this technology was destined to fail. Meaningful use is focused on adoption and use of electronic records as the final goal, which misses the whole point: that IT in health care, just like in any other industry, is a means to achieve the actual goal of efficiency. More importantly, meaningful use considers electronic health records as the only type of IT solution and ignores the fact that there are many other IT services that can help medical providers much more. The "one-size-fits-all approach," as American Medical Association President Steven Stack put it, of meaningful use ignores the differences between physicians and incorrectly assumes that medical care is mass-produced in the same way by all physicians and thus only one IT solution best addresses the unique needs of many different types of medical providers.

Meaningful use should have been integrated with the capitated payment models, in which the medical providers are paid a fixed amount per patient and are rather encouraged to provide the best care at the lowest cost. The need to cut costs and increase quality would have driven medical providers to adopt a wide variety of IT solutions that specifically address their unique needs. HHS should have set efficiency as a goal and let medical practices to find out the best way to achieve it through health care IT of their choosing. Instead of mandating physicians to record the smoking
statuses and vital signs of all patients, send them reminders about their follow-up visits, and communicate with them through secure electronic messages, meaningful use incentives could have been allocated to fund a wide variety of different IT solutions suggested by medical providers.

Why Doctors and Hospitals Need Better Health IT Solutions - US News
Health Information Technology