CHIME Honors Memorial Healthcare and Iatric Systems for Collaboration in Automating Meaningful Use Compliance

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) today presented one of two 2014 Collaboration Awards to Frank Fear, CIO and vice president of ancillary services at Memorial Healthcare, and Iatric Systems at the CHIME14 Fall CIO Forum in San Antonio, Texas.

The award was conferred as a result of an initiative to automate the process of measuring compliance with complex Meaningful Use objectives. This collaboration turned into a long-term commitment between a community hospital in Michigan and a vendor partner.

The end result helped the facility, Memorial Healthcare in Owosso, Mich., in a variety of ways. In addition to developing a solution that accelerated and greatly simplified the process for achieving Meaningful Use of its EHR system, the facility was able to use the technology to automate manual reporting processes, to educate physicians on the MU program and to gather documentation to withstand a rigorous CMS audit.

As a result of the collaboration with Iatric Systems, a new model for tracking compliance was developed, benefitting hundreds of other hospitals that needed an effective way to measure, report and defend their own Meaningful Use results.

The collaboration began in 2010, when Fear contacted Iatric Systems to determine if there was a way to track compliance with Meaningful Use measures. A partnership was formed to define best practices and new workflows to meet the requirements, and how compliance could be enhanced by technology. In addition, there were technical and cultural challenges to overcome to achieve compliance with the federal program’s objectives.

The result of the collaboration was the development of a dashboard that shows each objective and required metrics, as well as the latest results for each measure. Color-coding indicates the compliance status at a glance. The application also provides the ability to click on a measure to drill down for granular details.

Fear was able to use the application, called Meaningful Use Manager, to educate and motivate caregivers throughout the hospital. Memorial Healthcare was able to use it to make steady progress toward attesting to Stage One objectives and receive federal incentive payments.

The two partners leveraged the Iatric Systems PtAccess™ patient portal to aggregate patient information from the Allscripts EMR system used by physician practices with MEDITECH information from the hospital. In addition to meeting the Stage 2 portal requirements, patients now have all their information at their fingertips, including both physician encounters and hospital visits.

When the hospital received notification from auditors that CMS wanted to study its records for a Meaningful Use audit, Fear and Iatric Systems were able to easily develop documentation reports and audit responses, because virtually all the data used to attest was available from the dashboard; as a result, the hospital was able to successfully pass the audit.

About CHIME
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 1,400 CIO members and over 140 healthcare IT vendors and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and healthcare in the communities they serve. For more information, please visit www.cio-chime.org.

About Iatric Systems

Iatric Systems helps healthcare providers achieve success by delivering the most comprehensive healthcare IT integration. Our products and services focus on data integration, systems integration, and process integration. This allows providers to leverage existing IT investments to meet the growing demands of Meaningful Use, Health Information Exchange, HIPAA, and other industry requirements. During the past 23 years, Iatric Systems has delivered solutions to more than 1,000 healthcare organizations. For more information, please contact info@iatric.com or visit www.iatric.com.

About Memorial Healthcare

Memorial Healthcare is a 150-bed, full-service hospital in Owosso, Mich. Opening its doors in 1921, Memorial offers a comprehensive emergency department, two urgent care centers, outpatient rehabilitation centers, satellite primary care and specialty medical offices, and a cancer/endoscopy center. The hospital has more than 170 clinical staff and over 1,000 employees. Each year Memorial cares for over 28,000 emergency patients, 196,000 additional outpatients and over 4,300 inpatients. The facility provides the region with high-quality preventative, acute and rehabilitative care in its mission to promote compassionate health care through commitment to service excellence, teamwork and innovation. For additional information, visit www.memorialhealthcare.org.


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