Government Health IT writes the HIT Standards Committee – a group charged with identifying health IT standards to advance goals of the economic stimulus – approved 21 measures that healthcare providers must put in place in 2011, as well as a roadmap for future work.
The HIT Standards Committee recommended quality measures and standards that are ready and deployable to support the criteria for meaningful use. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, providers will be eligible for increased Medicare and Medicaid payments if they can show they are meaningful users of certified health IT.
The standards panel endorsed a matrix of 27 quality measures and 12 standards that build on each other to improve patient outcomes. The standards call for health care providers to use health IT tools for transmitting: Continuity of care documents; Discharge summaries; Inpatient and outpatient prescriptions; Laboratory test results; and Other structured health data.